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Rollback function has been changed

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T88044
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T136375

I've started experiencing a new behavior when using rollback (on one Win XP computer + newest Firefox, I'll check newer Windows platforms later). The most annoying one is that "blind" rollback (rollback without viewing the diff) now requires confirmation - an extra page pops up asking 'do you want to revert this edit' OK? Does anyone know where this implementation was discussed and how to bypass this feature? I've lost a quick rollback function for dealing with obvious vandals. Materialscientist (talk) 22:21, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm on the other side of that fence. I found it annoying when a stray click rolled back stuff I didn't intend to roll back. I gave up the rollback right after about the fourth time that happened to me. It's simply poor design to do something like that without a confirmation click, which only takes another second or two. But I don't know whether it was discussed. ―Mandruss ☎ 22:29, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
I'm with Materialscientist, it's also screwed up Twinkle's automatic completion of the linked article field when warning users. I've just returned to anti-vandal work after a short break, and don't feel inclined to continue unless I can do so efficiently.  —SMALLJIM  22:44, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
See phab:T49782 about that. Helder 16:03, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
I just rolled back two edits on this page - neither required a confirmation. — xaosflux Talk 22:57, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
Also with my testing account using all defaults - I do get the little spinning circle and the upper right corner has a popout confirmation box, but I am not getting a confirmation prompt at all. Xaosflux ep (talk) 22:59, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
Can you verify you are actually using rollback? (Hover the link and ensure it has &action=rollback). What is the exact text of the message you are getting? — xaosflux Talk 23:01, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
I'm thinking the enhanced "rollback" with WP:Twinkle is what you are seeing broken - I'm having a problem with it as well. — xaosflux Talk 23:04, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
This was intentionally changed due to phab:T88044. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:09, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Something has changed, but I did not get a confirmation dialog when I just now rolled back. There was a (JQuery?) box that briefly appeared in the top right corner indicating that that the roll back was successful.- MrX 23:11, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
Let me rephrase my original comment. If I preview the diff (of the edit I want to revert) then rollback doesn't ask to confirm it. If I try revert without seeing the diff then I'm asked to confirm it. I want to avoid this confirmation dialogue. I also want to see what I've rolled, particularly when rolling multiple edits (now I don't see it). I do not use Twinkle, just plain rollback. Materialscientist (talk) 23:16, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
I used the rollback link from history with no confirmation dialog appearing.- MrX 23:25, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
I used rollback from RecentChanges - no confirmation either - @Materialscientist: Can you copy the url you are using (copy before clicking) and paste here? — xaosflux Talk 23:29, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
  • OK, reproduced the problem: If using standard rollback, in a new tab/window it is no longer instantly working-ending in a confirmation. If you just click the links they process in-page now, instead of going to a new page. — xaosflux Talk 23:36, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Should we be able to have our cake and eat it too? (Basically just remove the Revert edits to this page? [OK] prompt?) — xaosflux Talk 23:41, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
    @Krinkle: - any hints? — xaosflux Talk 23:44, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
    (ec) Xaosflux is absolutely correct in that the confirmation dialogue appears only when I open the rollback in a new tab, which I always do, as I want to keep the starting page (be it my pre-designed watchlist or recent changes log). It doesn't appear if I roll in the same tab, but then I (1) don't see what I've rolled, and (2) can't revert several edits from the same user/IP. Annoying. Materialscientist (talk) 23:47, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
  • WP:LAVT seems broken for me. I also don't like that I click rollback, and the page refreshes suggesting that I haven't rolled back when I indeed have. (it still says "Rollback 2 edits") — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 23:53, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
    Admin rollback is definitely broken for Lupin's Anti-vandal tool. (Non-admin javascript is okay) The HTML that gets returned seems different, and the tool thinks that someone else has edited since the vandalism event. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 00:00, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • I've created phab:T136375 asking for a roll back - not sure if that will happen - please feel free to subscribe. — xaosflux Talk 00:12, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • WP:Stiki was broken with me too (since two hours ago). I've confirmed that my regular rollback issues are independent of the PC platform (WinXP, Win10) and Wikipedia skin (MonoBook, Vector). Materialscientist (talk) 00:16, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Added watchlist notice. — xaosflux Talk 00:27, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • The problem with Twinkle hasn't happened to me, even though I use Twinkle all the time. One somewhat annoying Twinkle-related thing I have experienced is that if you revert an edit by clicking on "Rollback AGF", it opens the user whose edit you're reverting's talk page and the Twinkle menu's warn option. However, this really isn't an issue for me since typically it's in everyone's best interest not to WP:BITE good-faith newcomers who make honest mistakes, and instead it is better to explain what they did wrong. However, I am unclear on whether this thread is for discussing a Twinkle error or, as Materialscientist's comment above would suggest, a WP:ROLLBACK error. Everymorning (talk) 00:38, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    We think the unexpected Twinkle behavior is tied to this change. — xaosflux Talk 00:41, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Please see my comments posted at WP:ANI at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Malfunction_with_automated_rollback. This recent change has effectively broken rollback while using Lupin's Anti-vandal tool and is producing inaccurate results when clicking (rollback) directly from the page history as well. Oftentimes it will incorrectly state that "rollback failed" when in fact it succeeded, and in other cases it fails to rollback entirely, on what appears to be a completely inconsistent basis. Is there an option in preferences which would allow us to revert back to the original rollback features before this change was implemented? Regards, Yamaguchi先生 (talk) 00:42, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • It's only saying that rollback failed if you're clicking the link multiple times before it has the time to process it (at least, that's what I've found from some limited testing). Same thing if you open the rollback link in a new tab 50 times; it will say that it has failed for the 49 times after the initial processing of the action. Obviously this change should have been better communicated to the maintainers of the anti-vandalism scripts, so they could update them before the change. There is no way of changing back on a per-person basis. Ajraddatz (talk) 00:51, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    No, we are not sharing the same experience in that case. I am seeing failures based upon a single click on an intermittent basis. A window box temporarily appears in the upper right hand corner of my screen notifying that rollback has failed, while a check of the page history reveals that the rollback actually succeeded. Regards, Yamaguchi先生 (talk) 01:04, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Oh, this sounds familiar — it wasn't with rollback, but I noticed one of those "blah blah has failed blah blah" popups when doing something or other, even though it was still working on whatever it was (the popup went away once the action finished)... Idk if that's related though. Goldenshimmer (talk) 01:45, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Any Idea if this is effecting Huggle too? --Cameron11598 (Talk) 00:53, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    I just fired up Huggle and made a revert OK. — xaosflux Talk 01:01, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Additional error As a test, I used rollback on the latest Sandbox edit, opening it in a new tab; it asked if I wanted to use rollback, and when I clicked yes, it went through properly. I then clicked rollback (no new screen) on my own edit, and again it went through properly. I then clicked rollback on my second edit (the result should have been the removal of the text in question), and I get a failure message:

    Rollback failed [line break] Cannot roll back edit to Wikipedia:Sandbox by Nyttend (talk · block · contribs) because someone else has edited the page. [line break] The last revision was by Nyttend (talk · contribs).

    When I open it in a new tab, it produces the confirmation page properly, but okaying the action produces the same error message. As of 01:00, 27 May 2016 (UTC), nobody has edited the page since my latest edit; it's not like an intervening edit got in the way. This is distinctly not good: the software's thinking that I've tried to roll back my first edit to the page, not my latest. Rollback should always attempt to revert the latest edit, doing any consecutive previous ones along the way, but here it's trying to do something different. Nyttend (talk) 01:00, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    PS, the sandbox-maintenance bot just removed stuff, so I rolled it back, rolled back my rollback, and attempted to rollback my rollback rollbacking, but once again, the third edit failed. I understand that self-reverting twice is an exceptionally rare situation, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore the tool's misanalysis of what link was clicked. Nyttend (talk) 01:02, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    @Nyttend: It's behaving as I would expect.
    • Your first rollback reverts all consecutive edits made by the most recent editor (Epizode), producing revision 722273317 of 00:54, 27 May 2016, identical to revision 722270423 of 00:31, 27 May 2016 by Everymorning;
    • your second rollback reverts all consecutive edits made by the most recent editor (Nyttend), producing revision 722273325 of 00:55, 27 May 2016, identical to revision 722271034 of 00:36, 27 May 2016 by Epizode;
    • your third attempt to rollback reverts all consecutive edits made by the most recent editor (Nyttend). This would produce a version identical to revision 722271034 of 00:36, 27 May 2016 by Epizode but as noted, that is identical to revision 722273325 of 00:55, 27 May 2016 by Nyttend, which is the current version; so since it's a no-change edit, you get the "Rollback failed" error message.
    It has worked like that since I was given WP:ROLLBACK in June 2010. Rollback doesn't toggle between versions, it reverts to the most recent version that was made by any person who is not the most recent editor. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:10, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Ok, this is kind of off topic, but I'm wondering, what exactly is the big deal over having rollback? Can't you do the same thing with a couple extra clicks by going to the page revision right before the offending editor, clicking "edit", and clicking "save"? This has puzzled me for a while. Goldenshimmer (talk) 01:43, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Replied on your talk. — xaosflux Talk 01:47, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Not sure if I really like this change. At the very least, there should be an option in Special:Preferences to revert it. Now I have to go through additional clicks in order to get to the user's talk page and be able to warn them with Twinkle with the "linked page" field automatcially filled in. I can at least confirm the option to leave a custom edit summary with a rollback as described at Wikipedia:Rollback#Additional_tools still works. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 02:35, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

There's an incongruency with this change and the user's settings. At Preferences -> Browsing, I have "After rolling back a user's edit, automatically open their contributions page" enabled. Enabling this gives a rollback failed message which may or may not be correct (it seems non-deterministic).

After I disable "After rolling back a user's edit, automatically open their contributions page", rollback indeed asks for a confirmation. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 03:33, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

That would be mw:MediaWiki:Gadget-modrollback.js. Helder 16:57, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • This change has absolutely neutered massRollback, which now requires me to go through each rollback page that pops up and individually confirm that I mean to roll it back. This makes it much more time-consuming to keep track of and revert the few prolific sockpuppeteers that I would consider myself an expert on identifying. What problem was trying to be fixed when this was implemented? This seems to have created more issues than it solved. ~ RobTalk 04:31, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Apparently the problem was the use of GET where the software should use POST. Helder 16:57, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

We've elevated this to a talk page notice? At minimum, we should have a temporary roll back the change so developers like myself (STiki) have time to accommodate the change. Why are we breaking legacy functionality? "Because it would be nice..." for HTTP POST/GET semantics to be normalized? This is much more understandable for security issues, but script/tool editors should have gotten some lead time on this one. What trouble does a temporary withdrawal cause? West.andrew.g (talk) 04:35, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

  • I can see no benefit in the new design. It now requires a lot of extra work when mass-reverting changes made by a single user. . . Mean as custard (talk) 08:30, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • It's as if Preferences → Appearance → Don't show diff after performing a rollback is permanently enabled. You can still get to the diff showing the rollback that you made, it's in the little box that appears at upper right, but it's an extra click following a (potentially large) mouse move to that box, which you might not complete before it fades. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:36, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Please could someone explain to me, preferably in words of one syllable: (a) when and where script developers were notified that this change was happening; and (b) how it affects scripts that do rollback using AJAX, by querying the rollback token and then POSTing it. Thanks. Philip Trueman (talk) 11:08, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    (a) This was added to the Tech News. Helder 16:57, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    • Granted. But this says nothing about scripts that do rollback via AJAX. No window is opened. Philip Trueman (talk) 18:37, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • WTF is this? Change rollback back. Was there even any community discussion or consultation before this change was made? Absolutely textbook case of a solution looking for a problem, and not only are anti-vandal tools like STiki now broken, the "warn" function of Twinkle is dead as well since the "linked article" field no longer autocompletes as rollback doesn't open in a new page anymore. This is some VisualEditor level incompetence and whoever instigated this deserves a good WP:TROUTing (and then some). Again, change this shit back. Satellizer el Bridget (Talk) 11:46, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • @West.andrew.g: Not sure what you mean by "talk page notice"? I added this to the watchlist notice because I thought it would reach the right audience without being too intrusive to people that don't use rollback. — xaosflux Talk 13:00, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • This is really annoying. The whole point of admin rollback is to be able to do a quick rollback. WTF? --jpgordon𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇 13:27, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Comment: I was wondering why Twinkle suddenly stopped working. Is this going to be fixed anytime soon? Why would a change like this take place without discussion and testing? GenQuest "Talk to Me" 13:42, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    The place to complain about "why was this done" or "roll this back" is phab:T136375 - if it gets enough noise perhaps the developers will revert. — xaosflux Talk 13:51, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
With respect, Xaosflux, no it isn't. The developers should be monitoring this page on a regular basis especially after any major change is implemented, because it's the first place that reports about such changes are likely to be raised. A pretty obvious way of helping to keep their customers happy, I'd have thought.  —SMALLJIM  14:21, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
@Smalljim: I agree they should be, and I did link this discussion to the phab ticket that I opened asking for a revert. From what I can tell this is change was wide in scope, so reaches far beyond the English Wikipedia. I suggested the phab page so it could get more "heat". — xaosflux Talk 14:50, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
As a tool developer I am monitoring this page, and its the first place I come when something breaks. If a mistake is made and something is broken, developers fix it. This is something else entirely. This is a change with seemingly inconsequential benefit that breaks a whole host of tools (CBNG, Lupin, Twinkle, and STiki). I can't imagine how many man-hours are going down the drain, and how much more vandalism is surviving longer than it should. It takes me time to code up a fix, test it, and push a new version. Responsible development finds the tools effected by a change and gives them lead time to make a change (and ideally, doesn't break legacy functionality without a darn good reason). Look to the recent "authentication manager" changes for a good example on how this is done. I haven't seen any mention made of harm incurred for a short term withdrawal of the change. West.andrew.g (talk) 15:01, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Yes, thanks for your efforts over this, Xaosflux. The apparent lack of any awareness (here and at phab) by the devs of the mess that this has caused is disappointing. I should think it's something their managers could usefully look into correcting - these are paid staff, aren't they?  —SMALLJIM  15:10, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

At the risk of looking like I'm just piling on here, I'd like to add my voice to those saying that these recent changes are entirely detrimental to the use of rollback (at least the way I use it). Reverting vandalism and other unconstructive edits is simply more difficult and time consuming now. Some of the problems I now encounter include: 1) Repeatedly being asked to confirm each rollback when rolling back multiple edits by one user, 2) after using rollback Twinkle no longer opens a user talk page with the "linked page" field automatically filled in, and 3) inaccurate "rollback failed" messages. Deli nk (talk) 14:00, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

And to add to the cheer, Cluebot NG seems to have been AWOL since yesterday evening. Now, I wonder how that could be? Philip Trueman (talk) 14:02, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

I'll add an issue I've observed: when rolling back with the option that allows one to enter an edit summary, which I almost always use, my summary text is not saved. DonIago (talk) 14:03, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

  • As Materialscientist said, normal rollback displays a loading gif, opening in a new tab needs confirmation. What pisses me off is that after the rollback is complete, it does not reload the page (previously it led to a new page with affirmation). Yet to see the behaviour with multiple edits. Nice to know the devs give zero fucks about the tons of scripts and users who were about to be affected by this. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 15:08, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    • There is a difference between not giving a fuck and misjudging the impact of a change. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:13, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
      • Whatever you say. Just rubs me a bit on the wrong side when all we try to is help the project and then we take a step back. Not a big deal, guess I should be more calm. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 15:21, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
        • Speed is probably the WORST metric there is when it comes to development. 17:53, 27 May 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheDJ (talk • contribs)
          • Back when I was a programmer in IBM, it was impressed upon us that "timeliness is part of quality". More seriously, I agree with you on the general point, but here we are discussing the particular point of the speed with which the developers admit their mistakes. By my standards, they are not doing well. Philip Trueman (talk) 18:29, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
      • I can't defend QEDK's language, but we won't be able to tell which of the two it is until we see how quickly the developers fix things. Philip Trueman (talk) 15:27, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Argh, same for Huggle actually. I can't revert on Huggle - at first I thought it might be down to my name change and HG not recognising my new name but nope, just saw this. I am therefore outlining that this has happened on Huggle too. Regards --PatientZero talk 15:13, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
@Patient Zero: Huggle is working just fine for me. —MRD2014 (formerly Qpalzmmzlapq) T C 17:10, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
MRD2014 - I'll try again now. You changed your name too, didn't you? I was Chesnaught555. --PatientZero talk 17:21, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

As noticed above, a developer is on this, and nothing should be broken anymore very soon. Thanks for your patience. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:51, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Elitre (WMF). --PatientZero talk 15:54, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Why are WMF ruining everything on this site ? ... As if VE, Flow and the green-background update thing isn't bad enough They now mess around with (and ruin) Rollback ...., WOuld be nice if they actually left things alone ......., 'Don't fix what isn't broken springs to mind. –Davey2010Talk 16:56, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
I agree Davey2010. Rollback was working fine until all this happened. --PatientZero talk 17:22, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Good to hear that everyone knows best about things they don't know jack about. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:53, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
I've never said I know best and I'll admit I don't know best inregards to rollback however when you fuck around with a tool that's used by a lot of people on a daily basis and don't bother saying anything then you should know shit's going to hit the fan - As I said above if you don't fix what isn't broken then there's not going to be a problem, Everything gets updated and improved that's life but this wasn't an improvement ... it was an inconvenience as demonstrated in this tread alone. –Davey2010Talk 13:56, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
Huggle now works for me, by the way. That's that sorted. --PatientZero talk 17:24, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Rollback works for me, but I don't like the new way it works. Before it would rollback the edit(s) and show me a new page with the edits removed, similar to an undo. Now, I get one of those little bubbles in the upper right-hand corner of the screen saying the rollback was successful, but it stays on the page, making me feel like it didn't work. I don't mind the bubble (they're now all over the place, e.g., "edit saved"), but I'd like to see the "proof" without going to history.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:35, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Somehow I don't think it has affected me. Whether I click on the rollback button on the same tab or opened a new tab with rollback, I get the same result (action complete with diff). Is this only a problem for Twinkle / Huggle / other similar scripts that piggyback on rollback for editors that have the rollback button? (But if you have Twinkle why do you need rollback so desperately? Just handle it at software level!) Deryck C. 22:18, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
@Deryck Chan: The changes were reversed (albeit temporarily) when you tested it out. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 22:30, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Reversion is queued

A reversion of the breaking portion of the change is currently queued for updates and should be deployed in a few hours. The new change is not a 100% reversion - so keep an eye out for anything unexpected. — xaosflux Talk 19:15, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Rollback is back to normal here now – straight to a page showing the diff of my edit so I can confirm I reverted the vandalism that I intended to. Just as it should be. And then on moving to the vandal's user talk page, Twinkle picks up the article title so I can warn without copy-pasting the title. Just as it should be :)  —SMALLJIM  20:15, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
So that works, but ClueBot NG is still down. —MRD2014 (formerly Qpalzmmzlapq) T C 21:12, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Rollback looks good. I confirmed that the generic WP:LAVT seems good. User-derived independent versions might still have issues (out of scope). Any confirmation about STiki or ClueBot NG? (I'm a bit worried about the bot) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 21:15, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Message left for operator User_talk:ClueBot_Commons#Your_bot_may_need_to_be_restarted - this is something the operator will need to address. — xaosflux Talk 21:24, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
ClueBot NG has been given a restart and should hopefully be back reverting - RichT|C|E-Mail 22:07, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • I'm seeing a random "1" at the bottom-left of the diff page after a rollback. Noticed it on the Simple English Wikipedia too. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 22:20, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
    @K6ka: Thanks for the note - looks like that is a bug that got rolled in to the release - I've notified the developer. — xaosflux Talk 22:44, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
  • @K6ka: - the spurious "1" problem has been resolved. — xaosflux Talk 23:18, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

I think it's still broken

I use PILT - my own modified version of AVT. One big difference is that PILT does MediaWiki rollback using AJAX rather than by opening a new window. That has stopped working and is still broken. Philip Trueman (talk) 09:50, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

A bit more thorough description than: "broken" is usually helpful. Unfortunately i don't have the rollback permission, so I can't really test this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:54, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
"Doesn't work"? More seriously, I think there is an onus on the developers to tell the users and script writers precisely what they have changed. Something has changed, and not been reverted, in the way Wikipedia responds to a script that queries the rollback token for a diff and then issues an AJAX POST with an option of action=rollback, passing the token. Maybe there's an additional required option now - I don't know. Maybe that action is no longer accepted, in which case they should justify the reduction in functionality. If there's a way for a script to query why such a request was not actioned I should very much like to learn it, but I'm not aware of one. Philip Trueman (talk) 03:25, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
An update: The relevant Phabricator request seems to have been removed by Aklapper. Frankly, I'm not impressed. Please can it be said boldly: This project is suffering from a total disconnect between the developers of the MediaWiki software and the users thereof. I want, very much, for that disconnect to be healed. If it is not, the project is heading for the garbage can. It is disappointing that the developers simply do not seem to care. Philip Trueman (talk) 20:05, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
Developer console allows you to use the debugger to step through any code and to inspect the requests and responses of any XHR (or normal for that matter) request. This might sound a bit snappy, but things change. If you can't debug this code now, then that means that you can't maintain it, which means that it by definition is going to break. If you write code you are a developer, not a user who needs to be told which 'importScript' to change. There is onus on MediaWiki developers to tell fellow developers about deprecations and removals yes, but there is no onus on them to figure out all problems. If you can't inspect a request, when other tools seem to have recovered just fine, then I feel very demotivated to start reading every character that was changed in the php code to figure out what is the reason for the 'breakage'. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:29, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
You make a fair point but I do not completely agree with you. I want to start by saying that in real life I am a professional software developer. I am used to writing code to documented APIs. Often, those APIs are not documented as clearly or completely as I as a developer might wish - DWARF has been a particular challenge, to take a recent example. The plain fact is, the MediaWiki API has changed recently, and I am not aware of any relevant change to the documentation thereof. I have seen indications that the developers are changing things in the area of rollback and AJAX - beyond that, I am ignorant. I very much want to know exactly what it is they have changed (that is still changed), and what they have changed it to. My code uses the API in a way different from that used by Twinkle, AVT, Cluebot NG and the like. So? I don't see that that makes me a second-class user - I want to know what the relevant change is. My code had not changed. I regard the failure of the developers to be more forthcoming as arrogant, high-handed, and worthy of condemnation. I will, as you suggest, apply what tools I can to determine where things have changed, but some constructive input from the developers would be welcome. Philip Trueman (talk) 21:03, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
@Philip Trueman: Hi, could you explain which specific Phabricator request I "removed"? Phabricator tasks cannot be removed, however the associated projects of a task can be changed (if you referred to that). If you have specific questions why I did something, please elaborate and I'm happy to explain. Thanks, --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 08:40, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
I apologise - I should have said 'closed'. As I understand it, you closed a request where a user (me) had made it clear that the fix seemed not to be complete, yes? Philip Trueman (talk) 08:43, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
@Philip Trueman: Thanks for clarifying. Hmm, the only activity of your Phabricator account seems to be in phab:T136375 which was closed by a developer in phab:T136375#2335144 (though more followup fixes took place after that action). My first activity in that task was removing unrelated projects from that task. Seems like some misunderstanding here. :) --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:56, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

@Philip Trueman: I notice PILT uses the (since 1.24 deprecated) rvtoken parameter of the revisions module. Reading the diffs of the code, I suspect that this deprecated accessor was not converted along with the other tokens and might have broken in this latest changes. I'm verifying with other developers. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:48, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

It appears this is also be reverted, still under (closed task) phab:T136375. — xaosflux Talk 16:57, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
Yes. PILT is working again. Thanks to those who listened. Philip Trueman (talk) 11:09, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
TheDJ: Thanks for this. I need to find the time to fix this, and any other deprecated usages, but it may take a few days. Philip Trueman (talk) 08:43, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Rollback past SineBot?

One minor annoyance I've encountered when using rollback (both Twinkle and the tool) is that when the editor being rolled back does not sign their initial post, SineBot will usually sign it for them. This cases a break in the string of edits and rollback only goes back to SineBot's edit. Is there a way we could have rollbacks ignore SineBot and include them in the rollback? A similar issue occurs when references are rescued by AnomieBOT. See the edit history on Talk:Racism from May 28 for an example of what I'm referring to. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 18:34, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

Twinkle has a button to restore a particular revision. →Σσς. (Sigma) 19:01, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
@Σ: I do use that when I realize there's an intervening edit. Problem is when I don't. Takes more time too (on my slow ass laptop with 40+ tabs open and whatnot). EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 04:41, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
True WP:ROLLBACK (as opposed to Twinkle's rollback) is a MediaWiki feature, which "rollbacks the last edits made by the last editor of the page; in other words, it restores the last version of the article whose editor is not the last one". It has no way of knowing that SineBot has a special task to perform: as far as the MediaWiki software is concerned, SineBot is just another user, which may well be the editor that is not the last editor. It could find out that SineBot is a bot, but would have no way of distinguishing it from e.g. Cyberbot II (talk · contribs) which also edits Talk: pages.
To get the behaviour of true rollback changed would need a phab: request. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:58, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Tony Dean (racing driver)

Hello, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on why the above article I moved into mainspace on 30 April does not appear in my list of articles created? Two others I moved at the same time did so immediately. It's only a small thing, I know, but it was my 50th article and these tiny milestones are the only rewards we can hope for. :) Thanks. Eagleash (talk) 15:46, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

I see it in these search results. Where do you not see it? Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 16:00, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
It does not appear when clicking on 'contributions' (top of any page) and then 'articles created' at the bottom of the page. I.e. here and then here. Thanks. Eagleash (talk) 16:11, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678 and MusikAnimal: because I think you're likely to be most useful here (xtools). Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 16:56, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Edit notice not highlighted

I added a 1RR edit notice to Flag of Northern Ireland but it isn't highlighted and I doubt it will be noticed by many editors. Can this be fixed? Thanks. Doug Weller talk 16:07, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: It shows for me. What are you expecting to see, but are not? --Redrose64 (talk) 17:24, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
On Template:Editnotices/Page/Flag of Northern Ireland you could add some styles or colors, see Template:Editnotice/doc for some examples. — xaosflux Talk 17:37, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. For some reason I expected to see some color. I've fixed it now so it's more obvious. Doug Weller talk 18:33, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Blocked for 1 century and 18 hours

I just blocked ThisIsaTest for 100 years, but the block log says that it will be effective for 1 century and 18 hours. How does 100 years end up with eighteen extra hours? I remember raising this kind of question before (but the other way: blocking for a year's worth of seconds ended up being several minutes short), but I couldn't find it with a search of the WP:VP archives. Nyttend (talk) 01:21, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_137#Weird_blocking_time. Basically it is a rounding error. — xaosflux Talk 01:44, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Note the magic 43 minutes and 12 seconds times too - 99.9% of 30 days. — xaosflux Talk 01:47, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Visual editor problems

Extended content

Expected vs observed behavior: "<small>" should be either in the "Style text" menu or should function as expected when typed (like "{{" or "[["); ideally both. If not possible/practical, it should trigger the "Wikitext markup detected" message. Also, the text of that bubble refers to a nonexistent user interface feature (a "Switch to source editing" menu option in the dropdown to the left of the "Save page" button); rather, that capability is located in the "Switch to source editing" button (icon looks like "[[ ]]"). The current reading is:

You are using the visual editor - wikitext does not work here. To switch to source editing at any time without losing your changes, open the dropdown menu next to "Save page" and select "Switch to source editing?".

I propose that it be changed to read:

You are using the visual editor — wikitext does not work here. To switch to source editing at any time without losing your changes, tap the "Switch to source editing" button next to the "Save page" button.

or:

You are using the visual editor — wikitext does not work here. To switch to source editing at any time without losing your changes, tap the "Switch to source editing" button (reads "[[ ]]") next to the "Save page" button.

or something to that effect.

Problem encountered at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wounded_Knee_incident&diff=prev&oldid=723118346 (see the bottom of the diff) (next parenthetical is tangential) (the <nowiki>''</nowiki> in the diff is user error attributable to trying to get the "Wiki markup detected" box to show up again so I could read the instructions for using the "Switch to source editing" feature without realizing that it disappears before the offending markup is deleted (I mistakenly assumed that its disappearing indicated that the markup was gone because I had happened to delete my added markup manually at pretty much the same time as the notification disappeared the first time I saw it); I wasn't being particularly attentive so I neglected to notice the continued presence of the '') (if anyone actually understands this tangential, "<small>"-ified wall of text, they probably deserve a fuckin award for language comprehension skills; I bet I'd have gotten lost and/or glazed over way before getting to the end of it).

Browser: FirefoxDeveloperEdition

Browser version: 48.0a2 (2016-05-31) Goldenshimmer (talk) 04:11, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback! mw:VisualEditor/Feedback is the best place to make sure it is seen. :) --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:47, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, I've posted it there: mw:Topic:T539q7on6cc8l30b! :) —{{u|Goldenshimmer}}|✝️|ze/zer|😹|T/C|☮️|John15:12|🍂 02:16, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Find sources

  Resolved

Could someone change Template:Notability so that the "find sources" external link creates a search query that excludes parenthetical disambiguators.--Prisencolin (talk) 03:53, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Discussion at Template talk:Notability#Find sources. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:42, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
This is now implemented. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:38, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Finding contributions of a editor who changed names

An editor was told at The Teahouse she was required to change her name. Sinebot signed her name with a link to contributions. Fortunately she replied with her new name and I was able to find her contributions with that name. But shouldn't a link to contributions with the old name somehow give us a clue as to how to find contributions with the new name?

She was asking for more help but in the articles she linked to neither name had contributed. And the other article she needed help with had been deleted.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:40, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

The talk pages redirect because the renaming occurred so I don't know what more do you need. The Recordings username has no contributions which I think is because they were moved. The new on has all the edits. It's the same as for Wikipedia:Courtesy vanishing. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 20:53, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
You can also see the rename in the log. — xaosflux Talk 01:17, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
When I go back to the contributions under the old name and click on "Log", I get "No matching items".— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:23, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Trying again on tech question

I asked about this on another page (got some helpful info but not quite the clarity I was after)..perhaps there are some very technical types here...FOR EXAMPLE: this very page/function/space I'm on right now must not have existed at some point in time...someone had the idea to create it and it was then created....how was it created? Did, perhaps, editors suggest it be created and then somebody at the Wikipedia Foundation had to code it/create it? Or are tech-savvy editors with certain permissions able to create it on their own?? Nobody seemed to exactly know when I posted this question at "idea labs" Thanks..68.48.241.158 (talk) 14:17, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi IP, perhaps you were looking for the help desk? Either way, any editor can edit and create* articles on Wikipedia - if you check out this guide you can find out how (* unregistered editors (like yourself) cannot create new articles outside of this process)-- samtar talk or stalk 14:25, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
I'm not sure you're understanding my question..I'm talking about an entirely new function/space not an article...68.48.241.158 (talk) 14:31, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
Ah! You mean (for example) Wikipedia:Village pump (carrots)? I believe any editor could propose such a creation and, if the idea gained consensus, create it. -- samtar talk or stalk 14:48, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
Anyone can create it without consensus, it would take consensus for it to stay though. -- GB fan 15:00, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
Any logged in editor can create a page in any space including a page similar to this one. It does not take any special permissions other than having a named account. Whether that page will remain or not may require a consensus discussion to take place. If someone believes that the new page is not helpful/does not comply with policy then they can take it to a deletion process. It is usually easier if the discussion takes place before hand rather than building the page and hoping it survives. If you are thinking about a bot to do the task you are talking about elsewhere, that will require approval before it can operate, see Wikipedia:Bot policy. -- GB fan 14:38, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
so this entire village pump space/function can be created by just normal editors and doesn't require anything on the end of the Foundation? what about the log of all blocks, for example..that space/function was and can be created by just anyone and placed into Wikipedia? and how sure of all this are you? if others could confirm/add anything...68.48.241.158 (talk) 14:46, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
See my response above, but in relation to the logs - these are programmatically generated by the Mediawiki software -- samtar talk or stalk 14:49, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
The entire Village pump are just pages in Wikipedia and like any page in Wikipedia they can be created by any logged in user. Logs are a different matter and that takes coding in the back end and would require the developers to take action. I am very sure of my answer. -- GB fan 14:58, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
and if a new/different log was desired what then would be the process?? you're saying normal editors couldn't do it, right?68.48.241.158 (talk) 14:54, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
Correct - It would be a 'feature request' made on our phabricator. This guide (shameless plug) helps explain the process -- samtar talk or stalk 14:57, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
Normal editors can not create logs that would show up at Special:Logs. Now if you are looking at a log like is at WP:SPI anyone can manually create it but if they want a bot to create it, then there is an approval process. -- GB fan 14:58, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
well it would be similar to that SPI and maintained automatically by a bot I suppose...so wouldn't have to go through phabricator?? but where would I request the page/bot be created?68.48.241.158 (talk) 15:04, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
You can start at Wikipedia:Bot requests. -- GB fan 15:09, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

so if I wanted a new log related to unblock requests the only process would be to go through this phabricator process, is that correct?68.48.241.158 (talk) 15:01, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

It depends on what you want. If you want it to show up as a simple list in Special:Logs then yes. If you want it on a page with additional information like the log at WP:SPI then no it would not go through phabricator. If this is related to the discussion about the unblock transparency, you probably don't need to go through phabricator. -- GB fan 15:04, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
Thought I recognised this train of thought - IP, it's likely what you're after could be solved with a bot as GB fan suggests -- samtar talk or stalk 15:07, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
okay, so it wouldn't require a petition to phabricator, right? the page (log) could be created and then maintained by a bot (and bot only) where would I a. petition someone who knows how to do this...and then b. it would have to be approved..before or after I request it be made??68.48.241.158 (talk) 15:11, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
The bot would have to be approved after it was made, before it started making any edits. If you didn't see it above you can start the bot process at Wikipedia:Bot requests. -- GB fan 15:14, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Okay, I guess that clarifies, thanks.68.48.241.158 (talk) 15:16, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

To clarify, the reason that a bot would be used here rather than a feature in Mediawiki (i.e. a phabricator request) is because unblock request (AFAIK) are not a feature of Mediawiki: they are handled basically just by putting the user talk page into Category:Requests for unblock. Things in Special:logs tend to be special actions, rather than normal edits. —  crh 23  (Talk) 15:48, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
okay, thanks.68.48.241.158 (talk) 15:52, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata alert is sticky

I'm getting an alert that I "edited" Wikidata by moving a page on English Wikipedia. How do I make the alert go away. "Mark as read" is checked, and clicking on it doesn't appear to do anything. I don't really care to receive such alerts that I "edited" Wikidata as a side effect of my English Wikipedia actvities; can I turn those off? wbm1058 (talk) 11:53, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

I see, clicking the "X" removed it from the drop-down; that's not standard, and expected, behavior. Now the notification is gone completely; seems odd that's the only way to "mark it as read". wbm1058 (talk) 11:56, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
I agree that the "X" is not obvious. We knew about this problem, so we've been looking at alternative designs. We now have a new design that we like, which we'll implement in the next few weeks. --Roan Kattouw (WMF) (talk) 19:43, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
@Wbm1058: In Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo You can turn off "show notifications from other wikis". — xaosflux Talk 17:43, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Now, what if I do want to see all notifications from other wikis except Wikidata? wbm1058 (talk) 17:48, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
That is not currently available. See mw:Help:Notifications/Cross-wiki. The programming teams are looking for feedback and you can make suggestions here: mw:Help talk:Notifications. — xaosflux Talk 17:56, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, maybe this open bug: Cross-wiki mark as read doesn't work is the problem? wbm1058 (talk) 18:04, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
@Wbm1058: Do you use a browser extension such as PrivacyBadger, Ghostery, AdBlock, or similar?
If yes: Those are the current usual/suspected causes of not being able to "mark as read" successfully (and what that bug you linked as now tracking), because they can prevent cross-domain API requests (IIUC). There's ongoing work in PrivacyBadger to fix the general problem. Other browser extensions can usually be fixed by whitelisting the other Wikimedia domains.
If no: I've filed phab:T136878 for the "mark as read" link in the "..." menu not working. Please let me know if that also doesn't cover the issue you're experiencing.
(Note: the "mark all as read" button which is shown at the top of the flyout, iff you have un-read local notifications, will not clear the cross-wiki bundle. This is to reduce confusion, as the cross-wiki notifications are not left in the local flyout, once read. Cross-wiki notifications which have been read, will eventually be shown in special:notifications - they're working on that at phab:T115316.)
Re: cross-wiki preferences, Xasoflux added your request (thanks!), and there are some followup questions for you there. Thanks, HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:04, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
I'm not aware that I'm running any of those browser extensions, but who knows what gets installed behind my back. I generally don't mess with browser extensions.
Yes, phab:T136878 describes what I was getting. I could not clear the notice count from 1 back to 0. When I clicked the "X", not only did it drop the count back to 0, it also removed the Wikidata alert from my alert list entirely. So I can't recall or tell you what the particular alert was now, I forgot which particular page move it was notifying me about. wbm1058 (talk) 20:31, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Odd error when using efn

A recent minor edit to Mark XIV bomb sight has caused a large error message to appear due to an empty REF tag. There is no ref tag at that point, it's an EFN. There are other EFNs on the page that are working fine. Can someone spot what's going on here? Maury Markowitz (talk) 01:38, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

It looks like User:Kind Tennis Fan already fixed this. — xaosflux Talk 02:10, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
@Maury Markowitz and Kind Tennis Fan: As AustralianRupert noticed, the problem was the equals sign inside the URL; but the change to using {{cite web}} added undesirable quote marks. All that was necessary was to explicitly number the parameter, i.e. use {{efn|1=An image instead of {{efn|An image. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:22, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks RR. So any tag with an equals inside will be something to look for? I'm not 100% I understand the cause here. Maury Markowitz (talk) 01:18, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
@Maury Markowitz: When you have a construct like 
{{efn|An image of the Mk. XI is available at [http://navigator.rafmuseum.org/results.do?view=detail&db=object&pageSize=1&id=125598 this page].}}
that is seen by the MediaWiki parser as a template {{efn}} with one parameter. When a parameter has an equals sign anywhere in it (outside of templates that are entirely enclosed by that parameter), the first equals sign is taken as the separator for a name/value pair. So, there is a parameter named An image of the Mk. XI is available at [http://navigator.rafmuseum.org/results.do?view and its value is detail&db=object&pageSize=1&id=125598 this page]. The {{efn}} template is not set up to have a parameter of that name, so it is ignored. By inserting 1= at the start, you are altering the position of the name/value pair separator, so now we have a parameter named 1 and its value is An image of the Mk. XI is available at [http://navigator.rafmuseum.org/results.do?view=detail&db=object&pageSize=1&id=125598 this page]. A parameter whose name is a pure integer is taken to be an override for the similarly-numbered positional parameter, so we gain the original intention at the loss of an extra two bytes. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:46, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Facilitating! Excellent explanation as always RR! Maury Markowitz (talk) 23:42, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Hide one user's edits from watchlist

Is there any way to hide a single user's edits from your watchlist? I know it is possible to hide my own edits and to hide all minor, bot, etc., edits, but I want to hide just edits from one user. There is a guy making a bunch of minor category edits to tons of articles on my watchlist, and they are drowning out the important edits I want to see. I can't find any option; does anyone know if this is possible? Thanks!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 04:20, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

This is not a native option, but you could try User:UncleDouggie/smart watchlist.js - it has many options. — xaosflux Talk 04:29, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
As far as "tons" of "minor" edits - if this is really a huge number, they may need to run as a bot. You can also hide minor changes, assuming they are being marked as such. — xaosflux Talk 04:30, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing me to that script, which I didn't know existed. It does appear to include an option to hide a single user's edits, as well as many other options that could be useful. I may install it later, but shortly after I posted this comment and before your response, I thought about scripting and wrote up a short script to do only what I wanted it to do. I just tested it, and it works for me. For those interested, the code is below:
var WatchListHiddenUsers=["Hmains"] // include multiple users if you wish, e.g. ["Hmains","Dudemanfellabra","user3",...]

function WatchlistHideUsers() {
    if (mw.config.get('wgPageName')!="Special:Watchlist") return; // only fires on watchlist
    if (Object.prototype.toString.call(WatchListHiddenUsers)!=='[object Array]') return; // if you haven't defined any hidden users, exits
    var edits=document.getElementsByClassName("mw-userlink") // find links to user pages
    if (edits==null) return; // if none, quit

    for (var i=0; i<WatchListHiddenUsers.length; i++) { // cycle through list of editors to be hidden
        for (var j=0; j<edits.length; j++) {
            if (edits[j].href.search(WatchListHiddenUsers[i])!=-1) edits[j].parentNode.style.display="none" // hide edits by those editors
        }
    }
}

$(window).load(WatchlistHideUsers); // run script when watchlist loads
--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 04:57, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the update @Dudemanfellabra: - feel free to update Wikipedia:Customizing_watchlists#Hide_pages_in_your_watchlist :D — xaosflux Talk 00:49, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Special:BookSources

Why is the box at Special:BookSources spread over four lines instead of two, why does it have fuzzy edges? Both of these waste space, and mean that extra scrolling is now necessary where it wasn't before. It looks very much like it's Vector skin, although I use MonoBook. And what's the asterisk for? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:51, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

I don't know about the asterisk but the layout must be mw:MediaWiki 1.28/wmf.1#Core changes (installed here 10 May):
I'm not a fan of the large space use in mw:OOUI. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 146#WhatLinksHere broken resulted in a conversion to OOUI being reverted at phab:T135773. I use Special:ExpandTemplates a lot and also find OOUI annoying there. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:06, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
The asterisk indicates that the field is required, and an attempt to submit the form without filling in the field will be rejected. — This, that and the other (talk) 08:02, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Geo co-ords not connecting to tools.wmflabs.org/geohack

When I click the geo co-ords at the top of a geo article, it fails to get a response from https://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/geohack.php. Eventually get: 502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.9.4. Nurg (talk) 08:55, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

I was about to report the same issue. I'm still looking for a way around it right now. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 13:15, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
It's working now. Nurg (talk) 09:45, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

MathML glitch

Display of formulas in composition algebra suddenly came up red though rendering had been successful on Preview. — Rgdboer (talk) 21:48, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Problems with math display

I'm seeing issues with <math> ... </math> expressions. Apparently there is a separate server to process these expressions? I'm getting messages such as:

Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":)

This isn't on a page I'm editing, just one I'm viewing. (Specific example at this point in time: Deconvolution (permalink to failed version). WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 21:39, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

A search on "MathML with SVG or PNG fallback" finds more examples. A purge has fixed all examples I have tested so it seems the problem is either gone or only affects some servers. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:12, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
This is related to T131177 which changes the default of the maths renderer form the 10 year old PNG renderer to a newer SVG system which uses server side mathjax rendering. It was made the default today. You may need to change your preferences to get things to work right, I had "MathML with SVG or PNG fallback" as my preference and I needed to change things to PNG and back again to get things to work. --Salix alba (talk): 23:02, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Stepped outside, just returned. Formulas rendering well now. Thank you everyone for the information and efforts. — Rgdboer (talk) 01:50, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Still a lot of messed up pages throughout all wikimedia wikis. I'm searching for Math+extension+cannot+connect+to+Restbase site:wikipedia.org with 78 errors across all languages.--Salix alba (talk): 04:48, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
I did a round of manual purging, so most of these should be fixed now. There was a brief outage related to a Cassandra upgrade not long after the preference switch (which caused a lot of re-renders), which resulted in these errors. Sorry about that. -- GWicke (talk) 15:10, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
Could you please check Kessler syndrome, I see the same error. --Michelino12 (talk) 11:00, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
I did an extra round of manual purges today, including Kessler syndrome, which now renders fine. Do note, however, that there are subtle differences in formula parsing between the old and new modes, so in some cases purges won't do it. If you encounter problems of this sort, please create a task in Phabricator and link it to T136931. Marko Obrovac, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 11:25, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Xtools down?

I've noticed over the past few days that anything requiring Xtools is non operational. I get that little spinning thing and the word "Connecting". Eventually it goes to 502 Bad Gateway. Same thing if I try to access Xtools directly from Labs: [1] — Maile (talk) 14:00, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

@Maile66: Same for me - possibly related to the section above? T136787 related, fix seems to be asking for a restart of the tool - thoughts @MusikAnimal:? -- samtar talk or stalk 14:06, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
Hmm I restarted all of xTools since the replica db issue, so this is unrelated. xTools requires a regular restart due to memory leaks and some other gobbledygook, but that should happen automatically. I'll investigate why it didn't, but anyway, I've manually rebooted and seems to be working now. Best — MusikAnimal talk 15:39, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
Everything is working now. At least, for me. — Maile (talk) 15:40, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Cite journal filler again

Sorry to bring this up again but the cite journal filler is still not working for me--when I try to use it to fill out a template by entering the doi or pmid, in many cases the template doesn't even load at all when I click on the "cite journal" button on the cite tab on the toolbar. I really hope someone knows what I can do to fix this problem permanently. Everymorning (talk) 20:36, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

I get this too if the doi is invalid, or sometimes it is valid, but it is for a book chapter and not a journal article. It would be good to get feedback if a problem is detected, and what that problem is. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:57, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
If this is an ongoing problem, then maybe we should talk about whether to switch it to the mw:citoid service. Alternatively, click the pencil icon in the upper right corner of the wikitext editor's toolbar and jump into the visual editor for a moment. "Cite" works really well there with most dois and URLs to PubMed. (Paste in the whole URL from PubMed, not just the PMID number.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:30, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Permanently use Desktop version on a phone or tablet

A reader contacted Wikimedia (ticket:2016052610025225), desiring to turn off the mobile mode permanently.

According to Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_136#How_to_disable_mobile_interface.3F, if they have cookies enabled and click on the desktop mode it should be permanent. However, they claim this is not so, or if so then the cookies must be expiring quickly because the reader has to re-enable the desktop option every couple of days.

Can we provide any advice?--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:08, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

It's not permanent but these cookies last for 30 days (as mandated by wmf:Privacy policy). User must have cookies enabled, and prefferrably JS too. Max Semenik (talk) 00:53, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
If they are using a browser, they may be able to workaround by changing their load page to this. — xaosflux Talk 02:09, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
I know this is then just for logged-in users, but can it be made permanently through a user-.css or .js (or a gadget or preference)? --Dirk Beetstra T C 05:06, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Sphilbrick, Beetstra: You can add 

location.host = location.host.replace( 'm.', '' );

to Special:MyPage/minerva.js. Nirmos (talk) 09:11, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

@Nirmos: Nope, that results in a constant refresh of the page (at least in the non-mobile). --Dirk Beetstra T C 10:33, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
Beetstra: You added it to Special:MyPage/common.js. It needs to be in Special:MyPage/minerva.js. Nirmos (talk) 10:54, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
Ah, thanks .. have to start keeping track of the different .js-s. At the moment it is not clear what .js does what and when (I thought this was skin-dependent ..). --Dirk Beetstra T C 10:58, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
@Nirmos: that had the same effect on mobile than what I earlier saw on a regular site: continuous refresh of the mobile site. --Dirk Beetstra T C 15:52, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
Beetstra: Does it work better if you make the assignment conditional?
if ( location.host.includes( 'm.' ) ) {
	location.host = location.host.replace( 'm.', '' );
}
Nirmos (talk) 19:08, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
I'm afraid that doesn't work. As long as the desktop page redirects to the mobile site, you will get stuck in a loop. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 19:21, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Hello all,

I'm the user whom Stephen was assisting, and many thanks to Stephen for being patient with me. So, is there a solution for this, other than having to be logged in all the time (and having to re-log in every 30 days)? I use 4 tablets and 2 mobile phones, with various browsers installed on each of them. If the only way to avoid the mobile site is to be logged in everywhere all the time, I'm afraid it's not very user-friendly. Plus, I use Wikipedia in various languages (at least 4 or 5 different languages quite regularly), which would multiply the obligation for me to be logged in everywhere to a quite unbearable degree (each mobile device & each browser on the device & each Wikipedia language version in each browser).

Sigh. I just wish Wikipedia never introduced this (to me) awful "tablet mode". My iPad Pro 13" has a larger screen than my MacBook 12 – to encounter Wikipedia's "tablet mode" on it is quite absurd. But I find it every bit as objectionable on the iPhone – I'm perfectly fine with Wikipedia's desktop version on the iPhone as well. Worst of all, the switch to "Desktop mode" is placed at the very bottom of each page, so if you land on a long page, you first must scroll to the very bottom of it (an ordeal on touch-screen devices), and only then you can get rid of the mobile version. If at least that switch to desktop mode was placed at the top of every Wikipedia page, I wouldn't mind having to activate it manually from time to time. As it is, though, I find the situation pretty much infuriating.

Thank you to anyone who could provide a user-friendly solution for this.

Alex aka Faterson (talk) 22:26, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
Isn't this just begging for a preferences setting solution?--S Philbrick(Talk) 23:26, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Transclusion count link not working?

At WhatLinksHere, the "Transclusion count" link isn't working for me. Is the service down? Example: https://tools.wmflabs.org/templatecount/index.php?lang=en&name=Tq&namespace=10

— Andy W. (talk · ctb) 17:17, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

It looks like Jarry1250 is the maintainer for that tool on wmflabs. Jarry1250, any information on this? — xaosflux Talk 17:45, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Is Template linking and transclusion check by Chameleon the tool you're referring to? That seems to be nonresponsive. wbm1058 (talk) 17:56, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
I'm referring to "templatecount", not "templatetransclusioncheck" (didn't realize that tool had a problem as well). But if this depends on this, that makes sense...? — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 18:10, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps someone from Community Tech (Tool Labs support) can help? BTW, congrats to MusikAnimal – m:User:MusikAnimal (WMF) on your new job :) wbm1058 (talk) 18:26, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks! We had an issue with the replica databases yesterday (phab:T136787) and I noticed some tools such as xTools needed to be rebooted after the replicas came back online. These two tools might also need a kick — MusikAnimal talk 19:09, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
I should have done this earlier, but I just logged on to #wikimedia-labs connect and asked an admin to reboot those two tools, and sure enough they're back now :) Probably a bunch of other tools that need a restart too — MusikAnimal talk 22:10, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
@MusikAnimal: Edit count needs restarted. Can someone write a bot that runs on something independent of wmflabs that regularly monitors the status of these, and orders a restart when it detects that they are down? This is a too-often recurring problem. – wbm1058 (talk) 11:21, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
Actually, we had an automatic restart script but had to disable due to unrelated Labs issues. However I think those issues have been resolved. So now we can set the cron to call that script every 5 minutes, when before the service was auto-restarting every two hours. Hopefully it won't misbehave... FYI, it's been the plan for some time to rewrite the tools from the ground up, but it's been a slow process — MusikAnimal talk 06:12, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
Sorry, got this confused with thread below. xTools is an edge case, most tools run on an lighttpd server which as I understand is automatically restarted on Tool Labs should they go down. Technically the lighttpd servers powering the translcusions tools didn't go down; my guess is the connection to the database was lost, and a restart was needed to re-establish it. In short, most tools shouldn't go down unless something dramatic happens (arguably infrequent), xTools on the other does go down regularly and requires a dedicated restarting mechanism -- hence why it needs a rewrite :) — MusikAnimal talk 06:26, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

Firefox section "jumping" bug?

Could some other users of Firefox test these links to Idea Lab:

Firefox "jumps" for me to a section much lower down on the page rather than to the desired section. (Actually, at first it does start loading at the target section but then it jumps.) When I load the page in a new tab it sometimes does not jump (but sometimes does). I've just tried version 46.0.1 for Linux using safe-mode and a new profile and the bug still occurs. This has been a long standing issue for me but I've only now been annoyed with it enough to try to track it down. Jason Quinn (talk) 06:42, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

This behaviour happens for me too. But it doesn't happen in Safari. Sandbh (talk) 07:16, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
e/c The second of those links takes me further down the page than the first, and oddly, doesn't show as a visited link when I came back here. I'm using 46.0.01 and Win 10. I've had this issue for so long I've come to think of it as normal, through many iterations of firefox. I suspect it is because I never clear my cookies or browsing history. It happens all over the project, and I'd like it if it didn't. -Roxy the dog™ woof 07:18, 4 June 2016 (UTC)ADDING - It doesn't happen on my awful ipad in Safari though. -Roxy the dog™ woof 08:34, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
Known problem, plenty of similar threads in VPT archives. The two collapsible boxes in Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 20#Extended confirmed protection policy are loading in uncollapsed state, then your browser moves to the correct heading, then the boxes collapse pulling the rest of the page up with them. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:53, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

Deletion reason gone missing

Normally when I delete an article which has a speedy tag on it, the deletion reason in the speedy tag is copied to the "other/additional reason" box on the deletion page. This useful feature has stopped working. I have tried different browsers and different machines. Bring the feature back, please. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 15:02, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, are you sure? I'm still seeing it in Firefox. Normally, I *don't* see it, since I usually check the article history before deleting, and that feature doesn't work from the article history. But clicking on the delete button directly from the page still seems to work for me. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 15:07, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
I also wrote a script to keep that function working from the history tab too (so long as you're going from the main article page to the history page, at least, which is how my workflow goes): User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/historyDeleter.js, if you're interested. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 15:46, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Possible clue: when I delete an article which has a talk page, I get offered a link to delete the talk page. If I click on that link, I am provided with the appropriate "other/additional reason". — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 12:46, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

None of my gadgets are working

I've tried this on two computers and two different browsers (Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, which both assure me I'm using the most up to date version). All the gadgets I use have stopped working, the most noticeable of which are that I can no longer rollback edits other than with my Rollback rights and I now have to tag articles for deletion manually because Twinkle isn't working. They work on college computers, but there Reflinks and Dabfix don't. What am I doing wrong?--Launchballer 10:47, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Do you have a working show/hide link in the table of contents on this page? (that requires JavaScript). Have you tried to clear your entire cache? What is your skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? Do you see a clock in the upper right corner at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example?withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js? Do you see a clock on normal pages if you enable "Add a clock to the personal toolbar" under "Appearance" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets? How about the similar UTCLiveClock at commons:Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets when you view normal Commons pages like commons:? Gadgets don't run when you are in your preferences pages so you have to test it on other pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:34, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
My show/hide link works, I've just cleared it, my skin is Monobook, I see clocks in all cases.--Launchballer 19:42, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
If the clock gadget works then some gadgets are able to run. Try to disable the broken gadgets, save preferences, enable one of them again and save again. Do gadgets work in the Vector skin? User:Launchballer/monobook.js doesn't run when you are in Vector. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:59, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
HotCat works a treat having changed the skin to Vector and back. Twinkle works in Vector, but I can't stand it. I suspect it may be a problem with my Monobook.js file.--Launchballer 21:06, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
It would be prudent in that case to temporarily disable the JS in your monobook.js by commenting it all out (place a /* before it and a */ after it all). By this action, you can establish if something there is or is not the root of the issue(s). Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 21:56, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
I have disabled it, and it now works. I'd love to know what's malfunctioning in there, since - as far as I can remember anyway - the only thing I added to it was DYKcheck.--Launchballer 23:03, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
var numNotes = /\d+/.exec($("#pt-notifications").text())[0]; throws an error because there is no "#pt-notifications element. Ruslik_Zero 20:23, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

Talkback template bug or my mistake?

I've been attempting to place a {{talkback}} template on an IP's talk page and point to a non-user talk page. Talk:Princess Charlotte of Cambridge is the specific page I'm trying to point to. I'm using Google Chrome on a Mac El Capitan OS, and when I place this code: {{Talkback|Talk:<Princess Charlotte of Cambridge>|[1st birthday]|ts=~~~~}}, per the instructions, it produces a talkback template which, where the name of the talk page should be, has this: [[User talk:Talk:<Princess Charlotte of Cambridge>#[1st birthday]|User talk:Talk:<Princess Charlotte of Cambridge>]]. Am I using the template wrong, or is there a bug somewhere here? Thanks! Chickadee46 (talk) 16:30, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

@Chickadee46: {{talkback|Talk:Princess Charlotte of Cambridge|1st birthday|ts=~~~~}} seems to work fine. In general, I believe {{Reply to}} (or {{Re}}) is used more often nowadays.not IPs — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 16:38, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Screen rendering

Minor glitch - now resolved

Going to wp:CCI looks fine in Mozilla, but in Chrome, the screen bleeds off to the right.

Mozilla: File:CCI Mozilla.jpg

Chrome: File:CCI Chrome.jpg

Note that "skip to Instructions" should be in the middle of the page, it is in Mozilla, but way to the right in Chrome.

The change occurred with this edit

Any thoughts?--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:06, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Actually, it was the edit before that, adding a rediculously long unbreakable string. Should be fixed now. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 17:05, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, I actually knew to look for a ridiculously long string, but someone, looked at the wrong edit. My guess is that Chrome takes it literally, while Mozilla decides to override it?--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:37, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Usb → USB

Someone should stop bots doing this and this to chemical element. Maybe it is not just one article (the one I've mentioned).--Obsuser (talk) 01:31, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Those aren't bots. Bots don't correct typos/spelling. I suggest using inline HTML comments to note that it is correct as "Usb". FYI: Obsuser and Project Osprey. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:57, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
It is AWB, actually ("semi-bot"). Other articles might get changed too, and this one is on my Watchlist so I will wait several days/weeks.--Obsuser (talk) 03:08, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
You could try wrapping it in {{Not a typo}} or {{Text}} older ≠ wiser 03:35, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Or the AWB-user should read what s/he is changing. When you add "Regex typo fixing" in AWB, it says "Check each edit before you make it.[...]". It is obvious it shouldn't be USB. Christian75 (talk) 08:18, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
If Usb is commonly used then the USB entry could be removed from Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos#New capitalisation. It appears rare and wasn't even listed at USB (disambiguation)#Other uses before I just added it. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:40, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
  Done I updated the typos page to not replace for initial first letter capital (Usb), it will still replace for all lc (usb). Feel free to revert if this causes any unintended impact. — xaosflux Talk —Preceding undated comment added 14:34, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
...though I had already added {{Not a typo}} to Extended periodic table. -- John of Reading (talk) 19:05, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Map template help

Arising from a Help Desk query, I edited Template:National Historical Parks of the United States map to add a site to the map (following the same code as the others) but the dot does not show up. diff Is the page too long or did I do something wrong? Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:04, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

You copied the position of Adams National Historical Park. I have changed it.[2] PrimeHunter (talk) 20:37, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks so much. If I may, how did you get to that "position" (somehow I thought it was tied to the article coords but that is obviously wrong)? Or, what do you mean by "position" in this context? Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:09, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
You copied position: absolute; left: 266px; top: 46px from the following entry in the template. These are pixel positions for the image and not geographic coordinates. I saw the right location in the infobox map in Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park. Then I found the pixel positions for nearby Kentucky locations in the template, adjusted the numbers a little, and previewed until it looked right. I may be a pixel off. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:27, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, again! There is kind of an invisible grid there then, gah! Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:39, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

No option to keep changes when switching to VE

I have noticed that when trying to switch to VE in the middle of an edit, it's no longer possible to choose to keep my changes. That was a very useful feature, as sometimes I switch to VE for things like deleting a table row, and I want to be able to do that without saving a half-complete edit. nyuszika7h (talk) 20:00, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

I think there’s no option not to keep the changes. The “switch” button keeps the edit both ways. --Tacsipacsi (talk) 20:52, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
You can't keep your changes if you begin in the wikitext editor by opening a section (rather than the whole page). Before the devs disabled this, the net result was everything except that section getting silently blanked.
I hope that they will someday be able to make this work properly (i.e., switch, keep changes, and not blank the rest of the page). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:29, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Visually broken dates in Multiple issues rendering

 
Screenshot

I've seen this for as long as I can remember, and have finally decided that I've had enough; can someone (else - I'm passing the buck) add the appropriate CSS rule to the dates in whichever module or template (Message box?) outputs them, to keep them from snapping please? Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 21:23, 5 June 2016 (UTC) P.S Chrome on Win7Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 11:02, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

This seems to be a Chrome (Blink) issue, as Firefox is not affected. If it's root is in Webkit, Safari may be affected as well. Toggling the display flag in the console seems to 'fix' it temporarely. I'm afraid no CSS can fix this. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:08, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Hmm, ticking show/hide also clears the issue. Perhaps the code for mw-collapsible is to blame? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:11, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
The screenshot is from Lea Salonga discography. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:17, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
If the date's <i> is given class nowrap, shouldn't that fix it? It does if added manually via the inspector/console. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 23:05, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Added
.mbox-text i {
	white-space: nowrap;
}
to my common.css; seems to work. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 02:20, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
OK, how does it look when the messages are long, as with Abbey? --Redrose64 (talk) 08:36, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
With my CSS, that looks fine Redrose64; with my CSS disabled, the longer one's date didn't snap, but the shorter did (table element width 1483px).Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 11:02, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
I don't think I can reproduce this Chrome issue on Mac OS X btw.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:53, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Autotranslate bug or display error?

For some bizarre reason, the content is getting switched on c:File:Пропаганда по стените на патлейнски манастир.jpg so that part of the first template is transcluded into the parent template. Oddly, this doesn't happen when I try the same templates on c:Special:ExpandTemplates. Can anyone figure this out? I'm not good enough with #invoke to know how to debug it. Magog the Ogre (t • c) 02:21, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

@Magog the Ogre: There are several templates - and other transclusions - at c:File:Пропаганда по стените на патлейнски манастир.jpg. Which specific ones do you mean by "the first template" and "the parent template"? --Redrose64 (talk) 08:50, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
Redrose64, the page looks like this, but if I copy and paste all of the wikicode to c:Special:ExpandTemplates, I see this in the preview on the special page. I did this which somehow fixed the problem, although I'm not sure why. --Stefan2 (talk) 20:31, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
<center> should be killed with fire. In this case, it may have caused HTML Tidy to throw things around to fit its own idea of 'legal' HTML. I replaced it with a div. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:33, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
Well how are users supposed to view the page if they're using Internet Explorer 3??? Magog the Ogre (t • c) 00:10, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
@Magog the Ogre: I honestly can't tell if that's sarcasm... we have a large number of users come through here using N-years out-of-date browsers on a regular basis... --Izno (talk) 12:37, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
@Magog the Ogre: OK, so by "the first template" you actually meant the {{PD-BG-exempt}} and by "the parent template" you actually meant the {{2-D in PD}}. To me, the first template is the {{Information}} (although the first transclusion is {{int:filedesc}}).
I note that since this thread was started, the file description page has been altered by Eesn (talk · contribs) to add {{CC-BY-SA-3.0}} which seems to be incompatible with the two claims for non-copyrightable work. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:52, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
@Redrose64: hope not to derail the technical discussion, this is a photo I've taken myself, of a government-commissioned work that is of cultural/historical significance. The work itself is uncredited, it refers to entities that no longer exist, and I don't think Bulgaria has an equivalent of PD-Polish. The three tags I've placed on it are to do with this particular situation (Two for the reason I think the work is in the public domain, and one to release my photo of it under CC.) I welcome any advise on this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eesn (talk • contribs) 16:05, 5 June 2016
Eesn actually added that license per my suggestion on his talk page. There is a lot to the photograph other than the 2D artwork, so I didn't think that PD-art applies. Magog the Ogre (t • c) 02:04, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-23

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

Recent changes

  • MathML/SVG is now the default <math> rendering mode on Wikimedia projects. [3][4]

Changes this week

  • The history page can tell you if a page on your watchlist was updated since you last visited it. This now works the same way in Vector as in other skins. The change broke local designs on some wikis. This will be fixed this week. [5]
  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).

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

20:51, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Advanced review log (reversions)

Advanced Review Log includes an introductory line stating,
This page lists the most recent pending changes reviews in a format sortable by namespace, action and type (manual or automatic).

But it lists only the articles where the changes were approved. Where is the list of pending changes reviews where the changes were reverted? —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:39, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

They are included but are relatively rare and may have no examples in the first page with 50 entries. Select "Unaccepted" in the "Review action" box to see them. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:59, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
I mean articles where the reviewer clicked the "Revert Changes" button on the review screen, and on the Special:Review revisions page, the reviewer clicked "Revert these changes". —Anomalocaris (talk) 22:31, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia Adventure for blocked users

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T137090

I see that this indefblocked user has been enrolled into The Wikipedia Adventure: [6]. It might be an idea for the Wikipedia Adventure mechanism (which I'm surprised to see can "simulate" edits), to check for account blocking before trying to do this. -- The Anome (talk) 08:40, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi The Anome, that's a good idea - did that user have their talk page access revoked? The block log suggests not, otherwise TWA wouldn't have been able to do this edit -- samtar talk or stalk 08:46, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
No, their talk page access hadn't been revoked, but I don't think we should be inviting blocked users to play a game, regardless. I think this goes for both indefblocked users, and also non-indefblocked users who might be blocked at that particular moment. I'm also a bit perplexed about "simulating" edits, as this makes tracking editor activity more difficult without any practical benefit that I can see: perhaps it might be better for the Wikipedia Adventure bot to edit under a single-purpose account name of its own? -- The Anome (talk) 08:48, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
The Wikipedia Adventure is a JavaScript script running client side and making edits with limited contribution by the user but it's still user edits and can only edit pages the user is able to edit. Blocked users can usually edit their own talk page. "simulated automatically" is just an edit summary chosen by the script. It should be possible for the script to check whether the user is blocked and refuse to run in that case, but it seems pretty harmless when some blocked users make all sorts of bad edits to their talk page. I strongly oppose users being able to make edits credited to a bot account instead of their own account. Many stages of The Wikipedia Adventure allow the user to add their own content. Even if it can only save in the user's own userspace (not sure that's the case), many important policies also apply there, and pages can also be moved later. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:18, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
Working as designed, the only edits were edits that can be made by the blocked user already - and indefinite is not infinite - maybe TWA will help them get over whatever they did to get blocked and could be used as an appeal. — xaosflux Talk 02:16, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Browsing

I'm having trouble at the moment with clicking links. I'll click a link once and it'll act as if I've double clicked it and the editing window will appear. What's causing the problem?♦ Dr. Blofeld 09:13, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

It works for me in Firefox and Vector. What is your browser and skin? Does the mouse show signs of unwanted double clicking elsewhere? Try disabling "Edit pages on double click" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:58, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
I had this problem a few months ago, and it turned out to be an issue with a corrupted mouse driver treating single-clicks as double-clicks. Does the same thing happen elsewhere (e.g., single-clicking a desktop icon acting as a double-click and opening it)? ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
I've disabled the double click edit article feature in my preference to stop it happening. Yes, may well be a mouse problem, I've not noticed the problem elsewhere though.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:08, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Unable to access "Your alerts"

I have an alert notice (red with "1") and when I click on the icon it fades a bit, but does not show what the alert is about and it does not go away. I tried resetting the notifications in Preferences, but that did not fix it. Would someone please reset it? Thanks. —Ojorojo (talk) 15:07, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

Does Special:Notifications work? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:32, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
I have what seems to be the same problem: clicking on the red alert button (or Special:Notifications) puts me on the Notifications page, but all I get is a box with the rolling diagonal bars. First saw this in the small hours this morning, and still happens. Pinging you (@PrimeHunter:) to see if you get the same thing. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 18:21, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
And instantaneous update: In the course off adding the previous comment I checked, and the situation was unchanged. Immediately after Saving I checked again, and ... it worked. Odd. Coincidental, or did the Save actually do something? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 18:25, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
More oddness: This morning my watchlist started displaying article (main space) names in big text. (I am using the Vector skin.) Coincidentally with alerts now working my watchlist has returned to normal display (all titles highlighted, but all text normal size). ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 18:34, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
I have also noticed random updates from 'Your alerts' and have learned to ignore them. I was going to this page to report that Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups are working again, as of today. Navpops weren't working for me in the last day or so. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 18:55, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
Alerts work for me. I have Firefox 46.0.1 and Vector. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:53, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
Now I get rolling diagonal bars when clicking on the red alert icon (same with Special: Notifications). —Ojorojo (talk) 13:46, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
@Ojorojo: Do you mean that it freezes and does not complete loading, after you see the diagonal bars? If so, the freeze in loading sounds like a gadget/userscript is interfering (I see you don't use any userscripts). Next time you experience this, please could you open your webconsole (per browser/OS instructions are in the last point of Wikipedia:Reporting JavaScript errors), then repeat the actions, and paste what appears in the webconsole? It should look something like this screenshot. (Specifically: Open your webconsole, refresh the wikipage you're looking at, then click the notifications badge (button), then copy&paste the text in the webconsole to here, or the WT:Notifications page.) Any additional details, such as the exact links that each error points to (e.g. this screenshot), and other thoughts on what gadget might be involved, and notes on any javascript-blocking browser-extensions you might have installed, would also be useful. Thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
@Quiddity: It's now back to the icon just fading a bit when I click on it (nothing else happens). The alerts are for a revert[7] and your recent ping. I haven't changed anything (gadgets, blocks, etc.) and there is nothing special in my set-up. —Ojorojo (talk) 15:06, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

What links here / templates

It would be useful if there were a filter for "What links here" results to exclude the effect of templates in articles. For example, many articles that link to Prohibition should actually link to Prohibition in the United States, typically piped as [[Prohibition in the United States|Prohibition]], i.e. Prohibition, or to the article about prohibition in some other country. Many articles that show up as linking to Prohibition don't contain the link directly, but are pulled in because of templates such as {{Prohibition}}, {{Criminal law}}, {{Social issues in Pakistan}}, or {{Social issues in Nepal}}. As another example, many articles that link to Murder, Inc. don't contain the link directly, but are pulled in because of one of the template {{Organized crime groups in New York City}}, {{Lucchese crime family}}, or {{Genovese crime family}}.

It would be useful to be able to to retrieve an instantaneously-updated list of articles that link to a page directly and not through templates that actually include the wikilink. —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:18, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

It's a frequently requested feature. Here are some of the requests:

PrimeHunter (talk) 21:50, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
PrimeHunter: Thanks. —Anomalocaris (talk) 22:31, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
For that record Search can facilitate such cleanups. Search offers linksto and hastemplate.
@Anomalocaris:
See Link reports at Help:Linking. — Cpiral§Cpiral 19:25, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

BLP problems with pending changes at Amber Heard

This is a weird problem, and also a serious one. It suggests that Google showed its readers the latest version of an article, regardless of whether the pending change had been approved or not. Since the whole point of pending changes is not to show readers edits that have not been automatically accepted, this may need to be looked at to prevent similar things from happening in the future. Amber Heard is now semi-protected.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 11:40, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

This rather depends on how Google is getting the data for its Knowledge Graph. It's not difficult to write a program to get the latest unapproved revision, and you don't even need to be logged in to do it. It might be that on the MediaWiki side we could make it easier for them to get the latest approved revision rather than just the latest revision, but mostly I suspect that Google just needs to fix the Knowledge Graph to make it work with pending changes. Until we know how they are getting the data, I don't think there's much we can do except for reporting it to Google. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 06:07, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
If memory serves – and it may not, so perhaps someone who knows more will speak up – Pending Changes is ignored for feeds to Google due to performance problems. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:41, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Special:Search question about why option to create new page does not exist

Just curious since this is probably a technical issue: I recently tried to search for an all-caps shortcut in the "Wikipedia:" namespace using Special:Search. However, usually when the search function realizes that the page doesn't exist, it provides a red linked option to create the page, but for this page, the option did not exist. However, through trial and error, I found out that this issue only happened with searches/nonexistent pages that started with "Wikipedia:" or "WP:" and the inclusion of the all-caps string of "REPORT" anywhere in the title. Is there some sort of setting causing this purposely, or is this an error of some sort? (I'm guessing that it's the former, but if it is the former, I'm curious where the page is [probably "MediaWiki:"] that is causing this to happen.) Steel1943 (talk) 15:03, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

"OR" between search terms is one of the Help:Searching#Search engine features so the software thinks it's search syntax and not a potential page to be created. OR doesn't work as search syntax in the middle of a word like REPORT but the software apparently isn't smart enough to figure that out. It's not set at Wikipedia. The same applies to other wikis with the same search software. Before this feature we got some silly page creations like page names containing prefix: or intitle:. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:32, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
See also phab:T23102: "Don't propose to create a page under a title with prefix:, intitle:, incategory: or other search operators". PrimeHunter (talk) 17:36, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
Interesting. Looks as though I will have to use one of the more complicated ways to make the referenced page(s). Makes sense though about "OR", though I was thinking there was something blacklisted instead. Anyways, thanks for the explanation. Steel1943 (talk) 18:47, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
Yes, such page names can still be created, for example via a red link WP:REPORT. Or search a similar name like WP:REPRT, click the red link in the search page and then add 'O' to the url. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:46, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Template:birth_date

Hello all,

I've a suggestion that will allow the specific code {{Birth date|YYYY|MM|DD}} to be used to display nothing. This is useful to be able to silently include it in {{Infobox person}} (and profession-specific variants of it such as {{Infobox scientist}}) examples. For new users inserting {{Infobox person}}, I've found it common that they don't understand the significance of the birthdate being commented out (<!-- {{Birth date|YYYY|MM|DD}} -->). When they insert the dates into the {{birth date}} template within the infobox, it is still commented out and doesn't display (examples below). I've put the code at Template:Birth date/sandbox. (ping Jonesey95, Izno). 

{{Infobox scientist
| name        = 
| birth_date  = <!--{{birth date |1987|02|11}}-->
}}

This "unfilled" {{birth date/sandbox}} template can be included uncommented out (({{Birth date/sandbox|YYYY|MM|DD}})), such that it works normally as soon as dates are filled in without having to remove the commenting: 

{{Infobox scientist
| name        = 
| birth_date  = {{birth date |1987|02|11}}
}}
Example 1a
Example 1b
Example 2a
Born(YYYY-Expression error: Unrecognized word "mm".-DD)Expression error: Unrecognized word "dd"., Expression error: Unrecognized word "yyyy".Expression error: Unrecognized word "yyyy".Expression error: Unrecognized word "mm".Expression error: Unrecognized word "dd".
Example 2b
Born(1987-02-11)February 11, 1987
<!-- {{birth date |YYYY|MM|DD}} --> → Example 1a (used in blank {{Infobox person}} template)
<!-- {{birth date |1987|02|11}} --> → Example 1b (incorrectly filled in {{Infobox person}} template if <!-- --> not removed). Example 1b should show "February 11, 1987", but doesn't because user didn't remove <!-- -->
{{birth date/sandbox |YYYY|MM|DD}} → Example 2a (for use in blank {{Infobox person}} template and doesn't need <!-- -->)
{{birth date/sandbox |1987|02|11}} → Example 2b (filled in {{Infobox person}} template without need to remove <!-- -->)

Hopefully the examples make sense. Opinions and suggestions welcomed. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 12:01, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Personally, I would change the code in {{infobox person}} to accept any arbitrary date format, e.g. YYYY-MM-DD, DD Month YYYY, or Month DD, YYYY. Then I would add the microformat <span class="bday">...</span> tags to that unless they were already present. That way new users can put any date format they like in the infobox field, and we don't have to treat {{birth date|YYYY|MM|DD}} as a special case. However, your proposal is better than the status quo, and I wouldn't oppose it. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 12:14, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
The {{birth date}} template is not the only one used in that infobox parameter, for living people the {{birth date and age}} template is normally used. But both of those templates are unsuitable for non-Gregorian dates; and the full birth date is not always available, for which {{birth year}} etc. are preferable. I'm sure the idea of moving the metadata classes into {{infobox person}} has come up before, and rejected as impractical. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:43, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
I see some legitimate concerns for the specific implementation, but I like the general concept of a template which, when the parameter is a placeholder simply doesn't display, but when the parameter is replaced with a valid entry then displays.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:44, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia is running slowly

I have been trying to edit pages, and whenever I try to access pages on English Wikipedia, it is taking close to 15-30 seconds to load, or is giving me an error. Please {{ping}} me when you reply. --Jax 0677 (talk) 18:29, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

@Jax 0677: There is not any information in your request that we can use to troubleshoot. Is the delay/error only occurring when you try to edit, or any access at all? What is the error message? Mamyles (talk) 21:06, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
Reply - It is now back to normal. --Jax 0677 (talk) 21:15, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

[Edit] links MIA on user talk page

Hi. Corinne is missing [Edit] links on all but the last six threads on her User talk:Corinne page. Where's Waldo? Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 22:41, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

And they're back. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:59, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Arbitration clerk call for script writer [cross-post]

The Clerks of the Arbitration Committee are looking for a script writer who will work with the clerk team to automate portions of the clerks' procedures. If you are a skilled script writer and are interested in working with us, please email the clerk team at clerks-l lists.wikimedia.org.

For the Clerks of the Arbitration Committee, Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) 05:31, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Arbitration clerk call for script writer

Ogg video subtitles will not activate on the Wikipedia

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T122737

Hi, I was referred here from the help desk. I checked this video with English subtitles here in the WP article. Before, they did come up, but now the subtitles are not activating. I thought it may be related to some language preferences of mine, but my search engine and Windows is English based, so why do not they activate, even when tapping on the "English subtitles" option. On the other hand, subtitles do activate on Wikimedia commons. Any hints welcome! Iñaki LL (talk) 07:33, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

This is related to phab:T122737. I've been reworking some parts of the subtitle support, to make it closer to HTML5 video support, but it's not completely finished yet. I've been a bit busy at work, but hope to return to this soon and get this problem fixed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:55, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
Appreciated TheDJ. Iñaki LL (talk) 10:04, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Claude Billard

Hi
I've just created this article but I unfortunately linked it with the same title to the French article of which it is a translation whereas the link should have directed to fr:Claude Billard (écrivain). Can someone please correct my mistake and tell me how to undo such errors? Thanks in advance, LouisAlain (talk) 13:30, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

  Done: I removed the link you added to wikidata:Q2977009 and moved it to wikidata:Q2977011. —  crh 23  (Talk) 13:37, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks a lot, LouisAlain (talk) 14:31, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Email throttle

I'm emailing people on m:Wiki Project Med#People interested, telling them the membership list is open and inviting them to fill in the form. I've just received a message, after 10 or so emails, saying "Action throttled: As an anti-abuse measure, you are limited from performing this action too many times in a short space of time, and you have exceeded this limit. Please try again in a few minutes." Is there any way I can get un-throttled? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 05:42, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

If you are doing that on meta: about the only way to get noratelimit would be to become a member of the accountcreator group over there (same here on enwiki) - this is not normally issued just so you can send lots of email, but you can ask at WP:PERM. If you want to notify a lot of people here on the English Wikipedia the best way is with talk page messages. Your message can be mass delivered by requesting at WT:MMS. — xaosflux Talk 00:23, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
  Resolved
Closed out via WP:PERM. — xaosflux Talk 15:20, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia to the Moon: voting has begun

Hello, after six weeks of community discussion about Wikipedia to the Moon, there are now 10 different proposals for content for the mission. Starting today, you can vote for them on Meta-Wiki, and decide what we will work on: a Wikipedia canon, different lists, the Moon in 300 languages, an astronomy editathon, featured articles, articles about technology, endangered things, or DNA-related topics. You can even vote against community involvement. Voting is open until 24 June. Sorry that this message is again in English only, but we are using village pumps to reach as many communities as possible, so that everyone knows they can vote. Best, Moon team at Wikimedia Deutschland 15:31, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Where did the color on "Collapse top" template go?

Why is the Template:Collapse top template colorless all of a sudden, and how can I put the green color back in? For one thing, I have my Barnstars collapsed on my userpage, so they won't hog the page like a giant advertisement. But I do want people to notice that the collapsed section is there -- and for that it needs color, otherwise nobody sees a collapsed section. Why did the color get removed, and how can I make it green again? Softlavender (talk) 05:02, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

@Softlavender: Answer to question "why?" can be found here. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 05:12, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
The default color was changed (with precious little participation in the decision, but whatever), and it looks like not all of the doc was updated to reflect the change. Try adding |bg=#cfc and see if that's the color you wanted. ―Mandruss ☎ 05:22, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
@Softlavender: I restored the color on your page for you. — xaosflux Talk 05:24, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
OK thanks for now. Softlavender (talk) 05:28, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
  • There should at least be instructions on the Template page on how to add color. This is an extremely drastic change to something that has been standard, and standard practice, for many many years. The color was there for a reason. Softlavender (talk) 05:28, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
The background color is specified using the |bg= parameter, which is documented. ―Mandruss ☎ 05:34, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Template-protection of TemplateSubster force?

Should User:AnomieBOT/TemplateSubster force be template-protected, rather than fully protected? Full protection was added to the page before templateeditor came about. I believe that most template editors handle templates and substitution fairly often to understand how the page is used, how it relates to {{Subst only}}, etc. (Perhaps I should disclose that I hold the template editor right.) Note that a page like Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Template redirects affects thousands of AWB editors, and is only semi-protected. Any thoughts? — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 07:28, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

In my understanding, substitution is actually preferred, unless a template satisfies some of these a template should be transcluded if:
  • The template contains a large amount of text that, if substed, clutters the page.
  • The template produces intricate syntax (template guts, parser function calls, etc) that makes the surrounding text hard to navigate, or, if the syntax is slightly modified on a future edit, could cause major visual damage to the page.
  • The template contains timely information that, if substituted, might be lost or not be updated.
  • The template is very visual (i.e. message boxes, infoboxes, tables, divs). Generally, incremental improvements continue to happen on these, and articles and other pages that transclude these need all the updates.
There's been a discussion on templates like {{ESp}} about whether they should be substed or not. In my understanding, the reason they're substed is that they don't contain absolutely vital information that needs to be kept up with template changes, and its substitution produces not too much code that makes a page much less navigable. Furthermore, these "minimal" templates deserve substitution to lessen the probability of major server churn upon template update. Hence, I think I'm not wrong when I say that the reason this bot service exists is due to the job queue, and performance reasons. I also think that most TEs would understand the extremely negative implications of adding an intricate template to the list. The page in question may benefit from having TEs access for management/housekeeping. Interested in hearing thoughts. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 08:15, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Notifying Anomie. — JJMC89 (T·C) 08:41, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. I'm happy to let the community decide what level of protection is appropriate for the page. I've updated the bot to accept template-protection there. Anomie⚔ 11:26, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
@Anomie: Policy wise - as a bot operator you are ultimately responsible for the edits made under you bot account, so changing your bot's operating parameters isn't really a community decision; you can pick what ever level of protection you deem to be appropriate. You can't transfer your accountability to others. — xaosflux Talk 14:27, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Corollary: You are also responsible for updating your bot to follow changes to community decisions, so this may help you let others guide that path. I've go no objections to whatever level of protection you deem appropriate. — xaosflux Talk 14:30, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
If I had an objection to reducing the protection level, I'd have objected. Template-protection should serve the purpose adequately, I think we can trust template editors to take sufficient care that they don't instruct the bot to substitute templates in a disruptive manner. Anomie⚔ 20:28, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: There doesn't seem like there's been a resolution to this yet. Any further thoughts? Thanks. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 17:04, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
@Andy M. Wang: What part of WP:SUBST states that substitution is actually preferred? --Redrose64 (talk) 15:06, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
@Redrose64: It doesn't, but I'm generally under the impression that the opposite (large amounts of unnecessary transclusion) can be costly in terms of performance. I'm aware of WP:PERF, but as a TE aware of the job queue, I think perf is something to keep in mind. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:44, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
WP:SUBST#Benefits, fifth bullet, states that "substituting en masse may ultimately speed up the site, but this is not a reason to prefer substitution over transclusion". Indeed, WP:SUBST#Drawbacks, fourth bullet, reinforces that. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:22, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
My two cents: since technical competence in the realm of template maintenance is assumed for template editors and they are also well trusted users, I'd see no problem whatsoever with them being able to modify that page, especially if they follow the guidelines that they normally do for editing template protected pages. Further, since the responsibility for the bot ultimately lies with Anomie and he has raised no objections, if no other objections are made I see no reason not to change the protection level. —  crh 23  (Talk) 17:13, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
I think this entire matter is completely up to @Anomie: , as an admin they can adjust the protection - or can decide they want to approve edits to their own page using the edit request process. — xaosflux Talk 17:26, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
I basically agree: I am slightly cautious as bot actions are somewhat community controlled by bot approvals, but I think this case is pretty clear: it's up to Anomie. —  crh 23  (Talk) 17:56, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
  • This would be very useful. As someone who closes and enacts consensus for TfD discussions regularly, it's often useful to convert a template to a wrapper and mass-substitute it. ~ RobTalk 17:39, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Since no one objected here, I went ahead and reduced the protection level. Anomie⚔ 13:08, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Bash (probably) script by another editor

 – Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 03:36, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

I've been working near WT:RDT recently and I'm trying to run scripts which Pldx1 wrote (to standardise the {{BS}}–{{BS14}} and {{BS-2}}–{{BS14-2}} series of templates and add /safesubst subpages), probably in Bash or another command language. Unfortunately they don't seem to be working, and I don't have any idea what's wrong with them. Could someone help fix (and possibly run) the scripts? Thanks, Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 09:43, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

For reference, the scripts are here.


nummax=115 # (i.e.  n<15)

##----------------- old ----------------------------------------------------------------------- computing the old BSn

for ((numbo=101; numbo<$nummax; numbo++)) ; do 
  num=$(($numbo-100)) ; vers="tmp_BS${numbo:1:2}-old.txt"
  echo -n "<includeonly>" > $vers
  if test $num -lt 12 ; then prefo="O"; else prefo="O0"; fi

cat <<EOF >> $vers
{{BSrow
|1={{BS-overlap|{{{PX|{{BSpx}}}}}|{{{1|}}}|{{{${prefo}1|}}}|{{{${prefo}12|}}}|{{{${prefo}13|}}}|{{{${prefo}14|}}}|{{{${prefo}15|}}}|link={{{L1|file:}}}|alt={{{alt1|#default}}}}}
EOF

  for ((i=2;i<=$num;i++)); do
    if test $num -lt 12 -o $i -gt 9 ; then prefo="O"; else prefo="O0"; fi
cat <<EOF >> $vers
{{BS-overlap|{{{PX$i|{{#if: {{{PX|}}}|{{{PX}}}|{{BSpx}}}}}}}|{{{$i|}}}|{{{$prefo$i|}}}|{{{$prefo${i}2|}}}|{{{$prefo${i}3|}}}|{{{$prefo${i}4|}}}|{{{$prefo${i}5|}}}|link={{{L${i}|file:}}}|alt={{{alt${i}|#default}}}}}
EOF
  done
  
cat <<EOF >> $vers
|2={{{$(($num+1))|}}}
|3={{{$(($num+2))|}}}
|4={{{$(($num+3))|}}}
|5={{{$(($num+4))|}}}
|bg={{{bg|}}}
|HI={{{HI|}}}
|km={{{km|}}}
|tw={{{tw|}}}
}}</includeonly><noinclude>{{doc}}</noinclude>
EOF

done

##------------------ safesubst ----------------------------------------------------------------- computing the new BSn

for ((numbo=101; numbo<$nummax; numbo++)) ; do 
  num=$(($numbo-100))
  vers="tmp_BS${numbo:1:2}-safesubst.txt"

  sepsep=""
  echo "<includeonly>" > tmp_vers
  for ((i=1;i<=$num;i++)); do
    if test $num -lt 12 -o $i -gt 9 ; then prefo="O"; else prefo="O0"; fi
    cat <<EOF >> tmp_vers
$sepsep{{{$i|}}}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}|}}} }}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}2|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}2|}}} }}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}3|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}3|}}} }}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}4|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}4|}}} }}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}5|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}5|}}} }}
EOF
    sepsep='\'
  done
  
cat <<EOF >> tmp_vers
{{#IF:{{{$(($num+1))|}}}{{{km|}}}{{{$(($num+2))|}}}{{{$(($num+3))|}}}{{{$(($num+4))|}}}{{{bg|}}}
|
  {{#IF:{{{$(($num+1))|}}}{{{km|}}}{{{$(($num+3))|}}}{{{$(($num+4))|}}}{{{bg|}}}
  |
    {{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}
    |
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+1))|}}}{{{km|}}}
      |~~{{{$(($num+1))|{{{km|}}}}}}~~{{{$(($num+2))|}}}
      |~~ ~~{{{$(($num+2))|}}}
      }}
    |
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+1))|}}}{{{km|}}}|~~{{{$(($num+1))|{{{km|}}}}}}~|~~ ~}}
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+3))|}}}
      |~ ~
      |
        {{#IF:{{{$(($num+4))|}}}
        |~ ~~ ~
        |{{#IF:{{{bg|}}}|~ ~~ ~~ ~}}
        }}
      }}
      ~
    }}
    {{#IF:{{{$(($num+3))|}}}
    |
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}|~~}}
      {{{$(($num+3))|}}}
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+4))|}}}
        |~~{{{$(($num+4))|}}}{{#IF:{{{bg|}}}|~~bg={{{bg|}}} }}
        |{{#IF:{{{bg|}}}|~~ ~~bg={{{bg|}}} }}
        }}
    |
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+4))|}}}
      |
        {{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}|~~ ~~}}
        {{{$(($num+4))|}}}{{#IF:{{{bg|}}}|~~bg={{{bg|}}} }}
      |
        {{#IF:{{{bg|}}}
        |
           {{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}|~~ ~~ ~~}}
           bg={{{bg|}}}
        }}
      }}
    }}
  |
    ~~{{{$(($num+2))|}}} 
  }} 
}}</includeonly><noinclude>{{doc}}</noinclude>
EOF

  sed tmp_vers -e "s¶^[ ]*¶¶ ; s¶{{#IF:¶{{{{{|safesubst:}}}#if:¶ " | tr -d "\n" | sed -e " s¶}}} }}¶}}}}}¶g; s¶}}} }}¶}}}}}¶g " > $vers
  echo "" >> $vers 

done

##---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 



##------------------ old-2 --------------------------------------------------------------- computing the old BSn-2

function bs-double (){

  if test $num -lt 11 ; then prefo="O" ; else prefo="O0"; fi
  
  cat <<EOF >> $vers
{{BSrow-2
|1={{BS-overlap|{{{PX|{{BSpx}}}}}|{{{1|}}}|{{{${prefo}1|}}}|{{{${prefo}12|}}}|{{{${prefo}13|}}}|{{{${prefo}14|}}}|{{{${prefo}15|}}}|link={{{L1|file:}}}|alt={{{alt1|#default}}}}}
EOF

  for ((i=2;i<=$num;i++)); do
    if test $num -lt 11 -o $i -gt 9 ; then prefo="O" ; else prefo="O0"; fi
  cat <<EOF >> $vers
{{BS-overlap|{{{PX$i|{{#if: {{{PX|}}}|{{{PX}}}|{{BSpx}}}}}}}|{{{$i|}}}|{{{${prefo}$i|}}}|{{{${prefo}${i}2|}}}|{{{${prefo}${i}3|}}}|{{{${prefo}${i}4|}}}|{{{${prefo}${i}5|}}}|link={{{L${i}|file:}}}|alt={{{alt${i}|#default}}}}}
EOF

  done

cat <<EOF >> $vers
|2={{{$(($num+1))|}}}
|3={{{$(($num+2))|}}}
|4={{{$(($num+3))|}}}
|5={{{$(($num+4))|}}}
|6={{{$(($num+5))|}}}
|bg={{{bg|}}}
|HI={{{HI|}}}
|km={{{km|}}}
|tw={{{tw|}}}
|tw-left={{{tw-left|}}}
$closequote</includeonly><noinclude>{{doc}}</noinclude>
EOF
}

for ((numbo=101; numbo<$nummax; numbo++)) ; do 
  num=$(($numbo-100))
  vers="tmp_BS${numbo:1:2}-2-old.txt"
  closequote="}}"
  echo -n "<includeonly>" > $vers
  bs-double
  
  diff -s $vers ../BSn-tmp/$vers

done

##------------------ safesubs-2 --------------------------------------------------------------- computing the new BSn-2

for ((numbo=101; numbo<$nummax; numbo++)) ; do 
  num=$(($numbo-100))
  vers="tmp_BS${numbo:1:2}-2-safesubs.txt"

  cat <<EOF > $tmp_vers
<includeonly>
EOF
  cat <<EOF >> $tmp_vers
{{#IF:{{{$(($num+1))|}}}{{{$(($num+3))|}}}
|
  {{#IF:{{{$(($num+3))|}}}
  |
    {{{$(($num+3))|}}}~
    {{#IF:{{{$(($num+1))|}}}
    |
      ~{{{$(($num+1))|}}}~
    |
      ~ ~
    }}
    ~! !
  |
    {{{$(($num+1))|}}}! !
  }}
}}
EOF
  sepsep=""

  for ((i=1;i<=$num;i++)); do
    if test $num -lt 11 -o $i -gt 9 ; then  prefo="O"; else prefo="O0"; fi
    cat <<EOF >> $tmp_vers
$sepsep{{{$i|}}}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}|}}} }}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}2|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}2|}}} }}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}3|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}3|}}} }}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}4|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}4|}}} }}
{{#IF:{{{$prefo${i}5|}}}|!~{{{$prefo${i}5|}}} }}
EOF
  
  sepsep='\'
  done

cat <<EOF >> $tmp_vers
{{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}{{{$(($num+4))|}}}{{{$(($num+5))|}}}{{{bg|}}}
|
  {{#IF:{{{$(($num+4))|}}}{{{$(($num+5))|}}}{{{bg|}}}
  |
    {{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}
    |~~ ~~{{{$(($num+2))|}}}
    |
      ~~ ~
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+4))|}}}
      |~ ~
      |
        {{#IF:{{{$(($num+5))|}}}
        |~ ~~ ~
        |{{#IF:{{{bg|}}}|~ ~~ ~~ ~}}
        }}
      }}
      ~
    }}
    {{#IF:{{{$(($num+4))|}}}
    |
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}|~~}}
      {{{$(($num+4))|}}}
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+5))|}}}
        |~~{{{$(($num+5))|}}}{{#IF:{{{bg|}}}|~~bg={{{bg|}}} }}
        |{{#IF:{{{bg|}}}|~~ ~~bg={{{bg|}}}}}
        }}
    |
      {{#IF:{{{$(($num+5))|}}}
      |
        {{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}|~~ ~~}}
        {{{$(($num+5))|}}}{{#IF:{{{bg|}}}|~~bg={{{bg|}}} }}
      |
        {{#IF:{{{bg|}}}
        |
          {{#IF:{{{$(($num+2))|}}}|~~ ~~ ~~}}
          bg={{{bg|}}}
        }}
      }}
    }}
  |~~{{{$(($num+2))|}}}
  }}
}}</includeonly><noinclude>{{doc}}</noinclude>
EOF

  sed $tmp_vers -e "s¶^[ ]*¶¶ ; s¶{{#IF:¶{{{{{|safesubst:}}}#if:¶g " | tr -d "\n" | sed -e " s¶}}} }}¶}}}}}¶g; s¶}}} }}¶}}}}}¶g " > $vers

done

(Moved comment, seeing as no one responded.) Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 03:36, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

What precisely happens when you try to run the scripts? "They don't seem to be working" is unhelpful.
In both scripts, try replacing all occurrences of with / in the sed line. In the second script, add nummax=115 at the top to match the first script, and replace $tmp_vers with tmp_vers. With those changes, they work for me (or seem to; I'm not sure what they're supposed to do). -- BenRG (talk) 04:21, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
@BenRG: Sorry for the lack of detail. Based on the behaviour of the first script, the scripts are supposed to create files ("tmp_BSn-old.txt" and "tmp_BSn-safesubst.txt" for script 1; "tmp_BSn-old-2.txt" and "tmp_BSn-2-safesubst.txt" for script 2) in the user's home folder, which should contain MediaWiki template markup similar to the text of Template:BS11 and Template:BS11/safesubst. Adding your changes, the problem for the first script becomes that the "-safesubst" files are empty (and a file called "tmp-vers" containing what should be in "tmp_BS14-safesubst.txt", but with all the newlines and spaces intact, is created). With the second script… nothing happens, like before. Not sure why. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 14:10, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
Just... no. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:07, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
@MZMcBride: well, I could always do all 56 of them manually. :/ Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 10:59, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
I have no problem with quick scripts to get a job done. But the learning curve here seems pretty steep, even for a technical village pump. ParserFunctions and parts of wikitext mixed with moderately advanced shell scripting? Yowza. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:18, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-24

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • You can filter user contributions to hide minor edits. [13]
  • It will be easier to edit galleries with the visual editor. [14]
  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).

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

18:41, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Not getting pings

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52082

I haven't been getting ping notifications for the past couple of days though there's nothing wrong withe pings themselves. I checked my notifications settings (prefs/notifications) and nothing seems to have changed there either with web notifications selected for everything. I know of at least three pings that I did not get because those pages are on my watchlist example, not sure how many I've missed. Is this a general issue or a problem unique to me caused by something stupid I did recently? cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 01:24, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

@SpacemanSpiff: Ping! mw:Manual:Echo mentions that for pings to work "The comment must either belong in its entirety to existing sections (the diff chunk of added lines must not contain new section headers) or start a new section (diff chunk starts with a new section header)." - could be the reason it failed for the diff you provided. Besides {{U}} is a shortcut for {{User link}} and does not always work the same as {{Ping}}. Could you give more diffs? - NQ (talk) 05:27, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
@NQ: I got your ping this time, but {{U}} is what I've always used at SPI and I've never had pings not delivered before. I've also pinged both @Tokyogirl79: and @Bbb23: using that at SPI and I'm quite sure they got it, just as I've got their pings using that in the past. I also didn't get this. I can't seem to remember the other one that I didn't get the ping for but accidentally stumbled on. The last ping I received before yours was this. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 05:59, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
@SpacemanSpiff: I was able to reproduce the faulty diff and since no pings were sent to me either, it must be something wonky with the way the diffs are being parsed by Echo. Hopefully, Redrose64 or Quiddity (WMF) can pinpoint the exact issue. Anyway nothing wrong with your notification system. - NQ (talk) 06:57, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, makes me feel better that it's not me! cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 07:27, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
@SpacemanSpiff and NQ: In the diff above, there are 69 calls to the {{checkuser}} template, each of which creates links to a different user's userpage. Add the call of {{U|NQ}}, and that makes 70 user links. Echo, however, will not issue any notifications if more than 50 users are linked. This is to prevent someone leaving a talk page message like You have been mentioned at {{WP:ANI}}. ~~~~ by mistake, which would transclude the whole of ANI and notify anyone that happened to have their user page linked there. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 07:32, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, that makes sense for the second example, but the first one is still a bit puzzling. I'll just ignore that as an anomaly. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 08:43, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
The first one might have failed because it included headings (this is the "must not contain new section headers" mentioned above), I'm not sure. On the matter of templates like {{u}} vs {{ping}} and others - what matters is not what the template is called or what it looks like when rendered, but whether or not it yields a link to a user page. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:08, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Yup, there are convoluted requirements for mentions to work. There's some ongoing work at phab:T135717 (and subtasks, primarily phab:T135719 at the moment) that is aiming to make it clearer to us when a probable attempt at a mention didn't work - the current end goal is likely to be: a notification is sent to me, when my edit contained what appears to be a mention, but no mention was actually triggered - this is more reliable and unmissable than adding the details into the popup-bubble save-message (as previously suggested). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:02, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Apparent glitch has disabled section editing

See User talk:Stunteltje. I tried a couple of possible fixes but they didn't accomplish anything.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:57, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

@Vchimpanzee: Whoever welcomed that user copied part of the Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee/Welcome_to_Wikipedia portal page to that talk page instead of using one of the real welcome templates. Since that is a portal page, it uses the {{Box header}} template which disables section editing by default. I cleaned up the template a bit so that it should no longer be an issue for that page. It might be a good idea to implement a similar fix to the other users that αѕєηιηє welcomed back in 2008. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:38, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
I haven't seen the problem on any of the pages I've checked so far. Thanks. Time to return to the real world.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:43, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
The problem was that Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia/box-header uses {{Box-header}} which suppresses section edt links by default with __NOEDITSECTION__. I have overridden the default by adding |EDIT=yes to the call [15] so the around 200 pages at Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia/box-header now have section edit links. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:46, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Cross-wiki watchlist feedback

Hi everyone,

The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team has started the design work for a Cross-wiki watchlist feature, which we were tasked to do by the community. Our goal is to build a beta feature that users will enable, replacing their current watchlist with a functional, easy-to-browse cross-wiki watchlist, if they want to. We'll be pinging some different Wikimedia communities throughout the process. If you're active on more than one Wikimedia wiki and would find this useful, feel free to take a look and tell us what you think.

I'm posting some early wireframes here that show the basic structure of how the watchlist items would look, along with some filters. There's two views pictured in these wireframes that you could toggle between, using the filters – a single chronological list that shows entries from all the wikis that you choose, or splitting up the list by project.

The feedback that we're looking for: Which elements would fit your workflow, and which would get in your way? Does the "chronological list" vs "split by project" filter make sense? Which one do you think you would use? What are the important missing pieces?

  •  
    Basic item structure
  •  
    Chronological - watchlist with filter options
  •  
    Just showing the current wiki
  •  
    Filtered to show two selected wikis
  •  
    Displaying watchlist by project

There's more discussion about this on Meta: m:Talk:Community Tech/Cross-wiki watchlist. Feel free to post your thoughts here, or there. What do you think? /Johan (WMF) (talk) 21:51, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Template and template redirect transclusion counts

Ahecht and I had a good discussion here about what exactly the transclusion count yielded by this tool actually means. I have been under the impression that the count given includes itself and all the transclusions accumulated by redirect aliases. I have also never seen an alias with a transclusion count greater than the main template. (Is that just lack of experience?)

Anyway, Ahecht pointed out to me that the transclusion counts of {{Reply to}} is less than the sum of the counts of its redirects. (Again, see here.) Any details about what exactly the templatecount tool is counting? Thanks — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 20:04, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

The thing to do is to look at a template with somewhat fewer transclusions, and add that up manually to see how the figure is reached. Consider for example Template:FC Armavir squad, which has a transclusion count of 20, whilst Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:FC_Armavir_squad has 43 entries, 40 of which are transclusions - but observe that every single one of those transclusions is duplicated, once (not indented) for the template proper, once (indented) for the redirect Template:FC Torpedo Armavir squad. This redir lists 20 transclusions at Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:FC Torpedo Armavir squad, and also shows a transclusion count of 20. So I would say that the transclusion count for the template proper includes transclusions of its redirs but does not double-count. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:26, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Ahh, so the discrepancy is that by manually adding up the redirects, I'm double counting pages that use two different redirects (for example, a page that used both {{ping}} and {{reply to}}). Makes sense. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:06, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Yes, the tool counts how many pages are transcluding the template but each page is only counted once no matter how many transclusions it makes or which redirects it uses. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:20, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
I dispute the advice of my esteemed colleagues in a couple of respects. The tool does a simple count(*) query on templatelinks.tl_title [16]. tl_title can contain a template name or a redirect name. Using RR64's example, I looked at page ID 19729356, one of the footballers, and find two rows in templatelinks, one for FC_Armavir_squad and one for FC_Torpedo_Armavir_squad [17]. Based on this, and my presumptions about the table structure [18] [19] I think that:
  • Querying against the template name in the tool does not count the redirects
  • The table will contain only a single row for any combination of Page_ID and tl_title, which is to say no matter how many transclusions of the same name there are in a page, there'll only be one row, but...
  • The table can have multiple rows which resolve to the same template (i.e. the 19729356 example) because the table links a Page_id to the transclusion name as used in the page - and that might be the template name or it might be the redirect name, and if both are present then there'll be two rows.
  • Summing results from the tool will be prone to overcounting the number of pages that link to the template, since a single page can be listed once for each template/redirect name found in the page
  • But, to reiterate the first point, one would need to sum the redirects and the template results, since the template result does not include the redirects
  • And in sum: Quarry is capable of answering the question you want answering, but I'm not sure my SQL is up to it tonight. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:07, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Your points sound contradictory so I'm not sure what you mean. The question was about https://tools.wmflabs.org/templatecount. That tool counts every page where a template is transcluded, no matter whether the template was transcluded via its own name or the name of a redirect. For example, https://tools.wmflabs.org/templatecount/index.php?lang=en&name=Hair_space&namespace=10#bottom says 5 transclusions even though no page says {{Hair space}}. All 5 transcluding pages at Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Hair space say {{hairsp}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:46, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Yes. On reflection, I withdraw the above and now agree: querying the template name in the tool does include the redirects. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:00, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Search parameter hastemplate: given a canonical pagename it report content transclusions, but given an alias (i.e. redirect) instead of a canonical, reports named transclusions. — Cpiral§Cpiral 06:25, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Bible Verse Finder fails with some translations

I'm not sure who maintains this tool anymore; apparently the person who migrated it a couple years ago no longer maintains it. Anyway, I noticed that it fails to find the JP and JPR translations on chabad.org, because the site reorganized and the API that this script used no longer works; also, it has problems with some other translations, according to commenters on the template's talk page. In particular, I found this problem while looking at Religious restrictions on the consumption of pork and for now, I think I'll link to the JPR chapter pages as they currently exist on chabad.org, bypassing this tool. Julyo (talk) 23:10, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Although Template:bibleverse (talk links edit) is highly visible (4000 pp.), it is just a protected and simple wrapper to an unmaintained tool. Problems like this must be addressed before these tools become too highly visible, or else users will make it our problem when wmflabs tools break. — Cpiral§Cpiral 08:34, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

math ml rendering changes and scribunto

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T121085

Perhaps related to MathML glitch because all of this was once working.

The cs1|2 citation templates produce COinS metadata. For those parameters that are included in the metadata it is necessary to replace strip-markers with the relevant content before the parameter value is encoded into the metadata format. For example, a |title= parameter value might be written like this:

|title=<nowik>some protected stuff</nowik>

When it comes time to generate the metadata for citation's title, Module:Citation/CS1/COinS function coins_cleanup() calls the Scributo text library function mw.text.unstripNoWiki(). In this {{cite report}} template, the content of |title= is protected with <nowiki>...</nowiki> tags:

{{cite report |title=<nowiki>some protected stuff</nowiki>}}

And it renders correctly:

some protected stuff (Report).

and the metadata are correct (title parameter metadata has the keyword &rft.btitle=

'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-00000054-QINU`"'<cite class="citation report cs1">some protected stuff (Report).</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=report&rft.btitle=some+protected+stuff&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWikipedia%3AVillage+pump+%28technical%29%2FArchive+147" class="Z3988"></span>

Because it is very common for technical, math, and science sources to include equations in their titles, a similar process is followed for math strip-markers. Except. Except that there are three kinds of math rendering: PNG images, LaTeX source, and MathML with SVG or PNG fallback. I speculate that the final replacement doesn't happen until the page is served to the reader whose preference may be different from the editor. Additionally, these math renderings come with varying amounts of extra stuff (MathML being the worst offender).

Because math is rendered according to user preference settings, when Module:Citation/CS1 encounters <math>...</math> tags it calls mw.text.unstripNoWiki() to get the original content and then retrieves a more-or-less plain-text version of the equation for the metadata. Here is the citation used for the subsequent examples:

{{cite report |title=<math>\Delta{H}</math>}}
  (Report). – the math part rendered according to your preference settings

In the following examples, we are looking for the metadata keyword &rft.btitle= and the content of the <cite>...</cite> tags. When the preference is set to PNG images, this:

<cite class="citation report"><img class="mwe-math-fallback-image-inline tex" alt="\Delta{H}" src="//upload.wikimedia.org/math/7/5/c/75c814119cf6370c3990177f3d8df055.png" /> (Report).</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWikipedia%3AVillage+pump+%28technical%29&rft.btitle=%5CDelta%7BH%7D&rft.genre=report&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988"><span style="display:none;"> </span></span>

and when the preference is set to LaTeX source:

<cite class="citation report"><span class="mwe-math-fallback-source-inline tex" dir="ltr">$ \Delta {H} $</span> (Report).</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWikipedia%3AVillage+pump+%28technical%29&rft.btitle=%5CDelta+%7BH%7D&rft.genre=report&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988"><span style="display:none;"> </span></span>

But, and this used to work, when the preference is set to MathML:

<cite class="citation report">?'"`UNIQ--math-0000001C-QINU`"'? (Report).</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWikipedia%3AVillage+pump+%28technical%29&rft.btitle=MATH+RENDER+ERROR&rft.genre=report&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988"><span style="display:none;"> </span></span>
(the question marks are place holders for the delete characters (0x7f) which are in this page's source)

Here is the MathML markup for this simple citation: 

<span><span class="mwe-math-mathml-inline mwe-math-mathml-a11y" style="display: none;"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" >
  <semantics>
    <mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD">
      <mstyle displaystyle="true" scriptlevel="0">
        <mi mathvariant="normal">&#x0394;<!-- Δ --></mi>
        <mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD">
          <mi>H</mi>
        </mrow>
      </mstyle>
    </mrow>
    <annotation encoding="application/x-tex">{\displaystyle \Delta {H}}</annotation>
  </semantics>
</math></span><img src="https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/6bfff277fb391783ce2379cc3ccc25fc3acd4ada" class="mwe-math-fallback-image-inline" aria-hidden="true" style="vertical-align: -0.338ex; width:4.02ex; height:2.343ex;" alt="\Delta{H}" /></span>

Module:Citation/CS1/COinS attempts to fetch this stripmarker's value with a call to mw.text.unstripNoWiki() as it did for the other two preferences. For this preference selection, the module looks for the <annotation>...</annotation> tags and extracts the content using this line of code:

rendering = rendering:match ('<annotation[^>]+>(.+)</annotation>') (rendering is the variable holding the content associated with this strip marker)

Because the <annotation>...</annotation> tags are not found, the module replaces the strip marker in the metadata with an error message: MATH RENDER ERROR.

A little bit of testing shows that the call to mw.text.unstripNoWiki() returns the strip marker. We know that the Module code isn't broken because the PNG and LaTeX forms work correctly and we know that the Scributo function works properly for those two forms.

It appears that the PNG to SVG changes prevent the Scributo library's function mw.text.unstripNoWiki() from doing what it should be doing.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:03, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@GWicke. --Izno (talk) 11:23, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Or maybe @Gwicke. --Izno (talk) 11:24, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
This sounds like the same problem as Wikipedia talk:Lua/Archive 4#stripmarkers and mw.text.unstripNoWiki(). That was filed as phab:T121085, but the task was closed as invalid. It should probably be reopened as a bug against the Math extension. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 12:08, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Certainly related. Changing from mw.text.unstripNoWiki() to mw.text.unstrip() does not change how the cs1|2 Module code works so this problem is not confined solely to mw.text.unstripNoWiki().
—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:01, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Disambiguation finder script

Does anyone know of a dab finder script that currently works? I used to use User:Meteor sandwich yum/dabfinder.js, but it stopped working a few months ago and the creator of that script has been away from Wikipedia for a while. Jenks24 (talk) 12:47, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@Jenks24: User:Anomie/linkclassifier highlights disambiguations links as well. - NQ (talk) 12:54, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately I don't think the 'on demand' function for it works with Vector, which is what I'm after (don't want it showing up all the time, just when I want to look for it). I'll keep it in mind if no one has any other suggestions. Jenks24 (talk) 13:05, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
@Jenks24: Just tried, works for me on vector. It's under the More tab as "Link Classifier". Links from todays FA 2003 Sri Lanka cyclone light up as green using the script on demand. - NQ (talk) 13:11, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Try the script on Wikipedia:Disambiguation - NQ (talk) 13:13, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
@NQ: Aha! Right you are, not sure what I was doing before. My quibble is that I'd prefer the whole thing to be 'on demand' so to speak, whereas currently it runs straight away on changing the colour of standard links. Is that changeable? Jenks24 (talk) 13:28, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@Jenks24:

It is supposed to be fully on-demand, but I’ve noticed that the normal links change to a different color with the script installed. Is that what you’re referring to? Or does the script load and show all the different colors by default in your case? What I’d suggest is create a separate css file in your user space such as User:Jenks24/linkclassifier.css with 

A.disambiguation   { background-color:#ffff88; }
A.intentional-disambiguation   { background-color:#ffffcc; }

and call it in your vector.js 

LinkClassifierOnDemand=true;
importScript('User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js'); // Linkback: [[User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js]]
importStylesheet('User:Jenks24/linkclassifier.css'); 
mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', 'javascript:LinkClassifier.onDemand()', 'Link Classifier');

You can always tweak the colors to your liking using the rules from User:Anomie/linkclassifier.css. - NQ (talk) 13:44, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Works perfectly! Thanks so much for your help, especially walking me through it all. Jenks24 (talk) 13:49, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Small search box

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T137535

Today in Firefox 47.0 the search box at Special:Search has shrunk to only display around 15 to 25 characters at a time depending on character width. If there are more characters then some of them scroll out of view. Are others seeing the same? It's the same if I log out, also at other wikis like meta:Special:Search. The box is around three times as large in IE 9.0. It happens in all four skins. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:02, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

See phab:T137535 in the bug tracker. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 12:26, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. I tried searching phab: for it at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/advanced/ which is reached by using the initial search box. I failed to find the right search but could easily have found it at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/advanced/ by using the "Created After" field to search recent tasks. Is there a reason (like server load?) that the former "Advanced Search" doesn't mention the latter which seems more advanced in many ways? PrimeHunter (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:52, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
BTW, see phab:T123907 request for wider search box. CirrusSearch added seven new, long, parameter names, and the ability to code-up regex. Typing into a tiny box is out of touch with that, esp on the page designed to help refine a search. — Cpiral§Cpiral 18:38, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Autopatrolled

On the page Wikipedia:Autopatrolled, there seems to be some ambiguity between the "nutshell" box and the subsection "Process comparison". In the nutshell box, The autopatrolled permission automatically marks new articles created by editors with this permission as patrolled. Whereas, at "Autopatrolled process", A person with the autopatrolled right creates a page... The software (rather than a human) marks the page as patrolled.

If a user is autopatrolled, is the user autopatrolled on all namespaces, or just the article namespace? — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 18:33, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Scratch that, Special:Diff/699873038 leads me to believe it's on all namespaces. Yeah definitely scratch that. (I didn't need to ask) Checked patrol logs on page creations outside of the space. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 18:40, 14 June 2016 (UTC) 18:46, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Yes, it's all namespaces; and you can check that by going to Special:NewPages, which by default lists pages in article space, and pick a different namespace - for example, User talk. Observe the large number of recently-created pages without a yellow background. If you ever see a yellow background here it's a bug, since pages in MediaWiki space can only be created by admins, who are by definition autopatrollers as well. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:47, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Template:Location map Belgrade problem

Hello! Please, can someone help me and create Template:Location map Belgrade using this image (File:Map of central Belgrade.png) I was trying so much, but its complicated! Please help! --Axiomus (talk) 10:05, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Copyvio tools

 
Is this what you want?

Some of you may know that I'm involved with Did You Know, and part of that review process is checking for copyvios and close paraphrasing. The DYK Toolbox within the review templates already includes Earwig's Copyvio Detector and the Duplication Detector from Labs. I'm wondering if a tool currently exists that automatically detects if a new article is partially or wholly copied from an existing Wikipedia article. It would be helpful in determining "newness" of content on nominations. Using, Battle of San Jacinto as an example, sections Retreat and Aftermath were copied a year ago by me from Texas Revolution, and I so noted in an attribution on the talk page. Yet, if I run Battle of San Jacinto through Earwig's tool, only external sites are searched; with the Labs tool, we have to know the specific article to link for search. Any suggestions? — Maile (talk) 16:35, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Earwig's tool excludes Wikipedia sites from its top 10 listing, but if you click "9 URLs with lower confidence hidden. Show them.", it will show those hits as well, which you can then compare. Doing that, you get this Intelligentsium 18:58, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
I don't see where I can click "9 URLs with lower confidence hidden. Show them." It looks to me like you specifically told Earwig to check against Texas Revolution. What I mean is when we review a DYK nom, can we do one click and see if it was copied from any other Wikipedia article. The reviewer isn't going to know what article to search, and the nominator is unlikely to reveal that. — Maile (talk) 19:10, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
It's at the bottom of the listings. Here's a screenshot, taken from a standard Earwig search. It looks like the exclusion list is just a text list - another possibility is to ask The Earwig to add a feature whitelisting certain normally-excluded sites on an individual search basis rather than editing the global list. Intelligentsium 19:19, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
Actually if you click on "compare" to the right of "Excluded", it will show you the usual highlighted comparisons. I see it now. And the number differs. I just ran one with 40 lower confidence urls, the bottom two were Wikipedia. But it's better than nothing. And it's really good to know. Thanks for the information. — Maile (talk) 19:30, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

IP editing in spite of global lock?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/188.29.164.102 shows two edits made on the 10th and 12th June 2016, in spite of an apparent global lock on the 188.29.164.0/23 IP address range covering it that has been in force from April 2016. What's going on? Does this represent a failure of the global lock mechanism? -- The Anome (talk) 09:31, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

If you look at the message more closely you'll notice that the global block is locally disabled here at English Wikipedia: "locally disabled by Mike V: IP does not appear to be a mobile provider, not a colocation service, anonymous only" --Glaisher (talk) 09:34, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Perhaps the clarity of the messages generated in this type of case should be improved, so that this is more easily evident to the reader? -- The Anome (talk) 10:09, 12 June 2016 (UTC)
Come up with a better wording, and it may be implemented. You're better opff finding a better forum for discussing this (perhaps WP:AN). עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:59, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
  Done I've updated the message to be more clear and include links, see Special:Contributions/188.29.164.102 now. — xaosflux Talk 23:05, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Locked, Hidden

When hovering over usernames the terms LOCKED, HIDDEN appear in capital, bold italics. What could be the meaning of that? Thanks. Dr. K. 22:13, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Assuming you're using navigation popups? —  crh 23  (Talk) 22:16, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
Yes, thank you. Dr. K. 22:17, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
It's supposed to refer to features at mw:Extension:CentralAuth#Global users but popups is wrong. MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js has the code:
if (globaluserinfo.locked !== null) ret.push('<b><i>' + popupString('LOCKED') + '</i></b>');
if (globaluserinfo.hidden !== null) ret.push('<b><i>' + popupString('HIDDEN') + '</i></b>');
"LOCKED" may be broken due to gerrit:45362. There is probably a similar problem with "HIDDEN". I have reported it at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-popups.js#LOCKED and HIDDEN are wrong. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:37, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
Err, that change is entirely unrelated and 3+ years old. Anyways, I fixed it by reverting the latest change to popups that had an issue. Legoktm (talk) 22:48, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
Thank you both. Now it doesn't appear anymore. Dr. K. 22:53, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
OK, thanks for the fix. For testing, User:Cmhhmfo really is locked (meta:Special:CentralAuth/Cmhhmfo) and popups reports it without making false reports for others. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:19, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Strange error

 
A screen-shot of Wikipedia showing a strange error.

Here is a strange, perhaps one off, error.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:27, 10 June 2016 (UTC).

This is from Dizzy Sal in monobook. It looks like MediaWiki:Sidebar was displayed to you in a faulty raw way due to missing data. Just ignore it if it's a one off. It works for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:51, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
Do you need to have the image this big in a discussion thread? ---Steve Quinn (talk) 04:28, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
Made it smaller, but maybe it can be made smaller. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 04:47, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
It's a thumbnail, which means people can click on it for the full-size view. I made it smaller, and replaced px with upright for scaling proportionate to the user size pref. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:51, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
Just a heads up, I just experienced the same error (OSX 9.1.1). - Yellow Dingo (talk) 10:54, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
I'm getting this error on Ming–Hồ War when logged out (so Vector) in IE11 and Firefox, on Win7. Screenshot. Eman235/talk 02:14, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Bizarre navigation box

 

What's going on? This is intermittent (my current window displays the navigation box just like normal), appearing on various pages unpredictably, and it just started. The situation made me think of a problem I caused a few years ago (see File:Holy Cow That's Weird.png and the section where it appears in the VPT archives), but the last edit to the MediaWiki namespace was nearly 24 hours ago. Browser is whatever the latest edition of Internet Explorer is (not Microsoft Edge), and using Monobook. Nyttend (talk) 10:56, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Related: #Strange error (above). Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 11:00, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
I filed phab:T137877 about this issue, along with a guess as to what's causing this. Anomie⚔ 11:36, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
Someone fed a mogwai past midnight. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 12:14, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
Or got it wet! KoshVorlon 15:50, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
Monobook? Wow... brings back memories. Intelligentsium 19:01, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Time comparison

I'm trying to come up with a way of comparing times on Wikipedia. Specifically, I want to create a template that would display an error message if a certain page hasn't been updated in 36 hours or so, the logic of it being something like 

if ({{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}} > {{REVISIONTIMESTAMP:Wikipedia:Article alerts/Last update}} + 36 hours)
  ERROR MESSAGE
else
  DO NOTHING AT ALL

or some such. I can't figure it out right now, so help would be appreciated. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:03, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

@Headbomb: The expression 
{{#expr:{{#time:YmdHis|-36 hours}} > {{REVISIONTIMESTAMP:Wikipedia:Article alerts/Last update}} }}
will return either 0 or 1. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:33, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict)
{{#ifexpr:{{#time:U}} > {{#time:U|{{REVISIONTIMESTAMP:Wikipedia:Article alerts/Last update}} + 36 hours}}|ERROR MESSAGE}}
Pages are cached so you may want a {{Purge}} for the user to trigger a current calculation of the passed time. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:34, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
Much appreciated! Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:56, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

AuthManager - is this the correct behaviour?

I've noticed a rather worrying behaviour with the new login system - I've not rigorously tested it, but I'd like to check at this point if it's expected.

  1. I log in on Machine 1, selecting the "Keep me logged in" checkbox.
  2. I log in on Machine 2, without selecting the checkbox.
  3. I close the browser on Machine 2.
  4. I open the browser on Machine 2 again. I am still logged in. (This is the worrying bit).
  5. I select "Log out" explicitly on Machine 2.
  6. I am now logged off on Machine 1 as well.

If this is the expected behaviour, I think that we should take some fairly urgent steps to notify people of the security implications of item 4 above. If it isn't, and it's not a problem at my end, we should take even more urgent steps to fix it. But I hope it is just a problem at my end. Tevildo (talk) 22:26, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

This is how it's worked for 7+ years. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:34, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
That's (I suppose) reassuring, but I've not noticed it before. I've always been logged out at Step 4 previously. Perhaps this time I just opened the new browser too quickly. Tevildo (talk) 22:42, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
The act of logging in sets a cookie on your machine; other login cookies that were set on other machines remain valid. Whenever you visit a Wikimedia page, your login cookie is sent back - if that is missing, or arrives corrupted, or is not recorded as a valid entry in the table held on the servers, you are treated as "not logged in"; you are only treated as "logged in" if the cookie arrives uncorrupted and also matches a valid entry in the table. The act of logging out invalidates all login cookies bearing your user name, whatever machine they were set on. Opening a browser normally leaves cookies alone; closing a browser may delete local cookies, it depends upon your browser's settings. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:12, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification. I'll make sure that I explicitly log out when I'm not at my home machine from now on. Tevildo (talk) 23:20, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
No, it hasn't! If you do not check "Keep me logged in", closing the browser on machine 2 should end the session. This changed since the last deploy (see tech news), the session is no longer terminated. This is a rather large security risk! -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:46, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
I have reported this trough the appropriate channels. Normally I'd blank this section, but I think the cat is way out of the bag already, so leaving it for now. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:33, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
This should be fixed for logins since about 15:35 UTC. If you logged in before that, you'll want to make sure to log out manually. As noted above, logging out anywhere will log you out everywhere (this is a feature of CentralAuth), so if you're concerned you can simply log out and back in from any machine. BJorsch (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Why would closing the browser on Machine 2 terminate your session, unless you delete cookies? Ideally, it shouldn't even be possible for a remote site to know you closed your browser. Though I suppose session cookies are generally interpreted that way, come to think of it. Wnt (talk) 12:11, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
@Wnt: Yes, because it's a session cookie. The remote site doesn't know that you closed your browser, but your browser knows to delete the cookie on exit. So, the next time the browser is opened and the site visited, there is no cookie to send with the page request, so it's as if you are logged out, even though you had not sent an explicit logout request. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:41, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
Both Chrome and Firefox apparently have (or had) behaviors where they don't delete session cookies, though I'm not sure about the specifics. [20] In any case the option to continue a session described there seems like a desirable user feature, since usually we want our browsers to tell other people only what we want them to say. Wnt (talk) 16:36, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Accessdate in one ref transferred to the other

(withdrawn)

I may not get a chance to look into this soon, so I should post the bug: a version with two copies of a ref, the second with an accessdate, previewed and saved with both copies showing an accessdate. Taking out only the second copy got rid of both accessdates. As I recall that kind of nonlocal behavior worries developers... at the moment I haven't made even the most basic experiment to figure out what happened though. The versions are before and after this diff. Wnt (talk) 12:04, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

I see this after your edit:
Mauney, Matt (June 15, 2016). "2012 documentary shows Omar Mateen working security during BP oil spill". Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved June 15, 2016.
Are you saying you don't see "Retrieved June 15, 2016" at the end? Were you maybe thinking of another situation where the references have the same name but different content? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:24, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
OK, that's weird. I was positive the first Orlando Sentinel accessdate disappeared at the same time, but now I see it and there's nothing out of the ordinary. I looked at both previews and looked at both history versions before I posted this. Now I have no idea. Could there be a caching issue deep in the cite template? I doubt it. Maybe I was just having an unusually persistent hallucination... in any case, I'll withdraw this because there's nothing to look at now. Wnt (talk) 16:45, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

New formulas layout

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T137765
Question Remark
Who and why have changed layout of formulas? Now I can't see formulas in my browser Opera 9.27 [21] https://s.sender.mobi/u/image/2016/6/11/bvB7Yijef/-.JPG . Yes, it's old but my computer has not enough resources for newer browser. Please explain what gain gives new layout and what was purpose.

Also W3 validator shows errors. I think , the simplier interface is the better for community. And blocking some browsers is equivalent to denying access to wikipedia for some people. It's much worse than any gains from optimisation, server load, etc.

Please, restore old layout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Help_desk&diff=724748758&oldid=724736878

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk#Wikipedia.27s_new_formulas_layout

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula

By default SVG images with non-visible MathML are generated. The older PNG images can be set via user preferences.[b]

But I don't want to register and login (I haven't e-mail , time and desire to do it).

37.53.235.112 (talk) 11:07, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Just so you know, an email address is not required to make a Wikipedia account - you need nothing more than a username and password. As well as being able to edit your preferences, there are various other benefits. —  crh 23  (Talk) 13:21, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
If you can chooose a username and password quickly then it takes less than a minute to create an account. I don't know which Opera versions have problems with formulas but Opera 9 and older have less than 0.1% of our traffic. Opera is free and version 10 is from 2009. There comes a point where old browsers are not worth supporting 100% if it limits what a website can do or forces it to spend considerable time on browser support. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:28, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
There was a temporary bug in the PNG fall-back generation, which has since been fixed (see T136905). It is likely that Opera 9 is correctly loading PNG fall-back images now. If you could check this, it would be much appreciated. -- GWicke (talk) 19:47, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
No, still broken as far as I can tell. It looks like it is trying to load the SVG, but failing. If I open the image by itself in a tab, it displays fine. Pretty sure it is a problem with outdated handling of SVGs rather than a wikimedia problem. —  crh 23  (Talk) 19:59, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
I see, that's too bad. I had hoped that document.implementation.hasFeature('http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/feature#Image', '1.1') would return false in Opera 9, which would cause it to switch to the PNG fall-back. @Crh23:, do you have JavaScript enabled? If yes, could you test what this JS snippet returns? While I agree that Opera 9 is old, it might still be easy enough to support it well, if we can figure out why the PNG fall-back is not loaded. -- GWicke (talk) 01:20, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
I couldn't find a proper JS console, but putting javascript:{document.implementation.hasFeature('http//www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/feature#Image', '1.1')} in the address bar indeed returns true. I had quite an adventure trying to get a JS console to work, including executing code from archive.org —  crh 23  (Talk) 10:41, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
The SVGs load correctly if <img .../> is replaced with <object .../>, as 37.53.235.112 suggested. —  crh 23  (Talk) 11:45, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Pinging GWicke —  crh 23  (Talk) 12:25, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
A right, so we have the wrong feature detection, because SVG support is not the same as supporting SVG inline images... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:18, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
I went ahead & created T137765 for this browser-specific issue, so that we don't forget to investigate this. -- GWicke (talk) 01:37, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
Question Quote
When I set option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences > Math > PNG images , I see images with javascripts enabled and with javascripts disabled (I prefer disabled) . https://s.sender.mobi/u/image/2016/6/14/4gsBK2Sne/-.JPG

But also I see , web-developers have changed layout when radiobutton "MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools)" checked (or when user is logged out). Earlier it was meta -tag, but now img-tag. In both cases web-developer is wrong . If you use SVG you must use 

<object data="https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/25d87ca6fbcf46962b80e528a7a7c00d1982c21b"></object>

Just read standards and don't use undocumented features of trash-browsers.

No, still broken as far as I can tell.

Yes, you give me some patch through preferences, but you still have not explained the reason and purpose of the changes of layout.

37.53.235.112 (talk) 05:03, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

I was gonna answer this seriously, but there is little use in talking to people who just want to be angry with other people and are not really interested in the actual challenges involved, and whose knowledge of website development is clearly stuck in the year 2008. You have been heard, I'm sure the rest of us will look at finding a solution. Thank you for your report. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:18, 15 June 2016 (UTC)


Nothing was angry in my post and I didn't try to offend anybody. But if you have ability to make pages working in all browsers, why not apply it? Moreover site was working, but consciously converted to partially worked. For whom do you write html-code? If for yourself then OK, go on. But if for humankind, then stop. W3C recommends object tag http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html#SVG_in_HTML [Secondly, it is worth pointing out that only <object> works consistently with the W3C standards, meaning at this time one must choose between standards consistency, or browser consistency.]. And please don't allege HTML5, as Opera 9 has not support of it. Also Opera 9.64 has many bugs, and is unstable (that's why there are many fans of 9.27 what may seem illogically. Actually no more Presto Opera was in such degree of stability, versions >9 were raw as Opera Software concentrated force on promosion for money instead of development, optimization, testing, etc. , Tetzchner left company because of this reason). Note that Opera 9.27 is Final for Merlin project http://www.opera.com/docs/history/presto/ . 37.53.235.112 (talk) 20:10, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Discussion at Template talk:This is a redirect#Accessibility issue

 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:This is a redirect#Accessibility issue. nyuszika7h (talk) 20:49, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

One-Click Archiver sending threads to the wrong page's archive

I just noticed this from looking at my past edits. I have been One-Click Archiving some resolved or very stale threads on Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request, but they went to Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Archive 1 (the archive of Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange) instead of the Resource Requests page's archives, which would have currently been Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request/Archive 28. ClueBot III gets it right, so why is One-Click Archiver botching up? I've never had this problem before with One-Click Archiver. I don't know all that much about archiving coding so I can't figure it out and can't figure out how to fix it. Anybody? Softlavender (talk) 12:39, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

For the record, User:Softlavender/common.js imports User:Technical 13/Scripts/OneClickArchiver.js, documented at User:Technical 13/Scripts/OneClickArchiver which says: "This tool works, but due to Technical 13's indefinite ban, it is currently unmaintained. Other users are encouraged to take on the task of developing and maintaining it." The script has not been edited since Technical 13 was blocked a year ago. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:05, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
@Softlavender: If a page is archived automatically - for instance, by ClueBot III (talk · contribs) - there should not normally be a need to manually archive threads. OneClickArchiver counts as manual archiving: just leave the threads alone for the bot to pick up. About a month ago, Sunekit (talk · contribs) caused some serious mess by OneClickArchiving a number of threads at various Village Pumps, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 146#OneClickArchiver misarchiving. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:25, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
One-Click Archiver should work no matter what, and there are many instances where it is more useful than the auto-archiving (WP:ANI is a prime example). I'm asking for help in how to remedy this situation. As Oiyarbepsy mentioned in the thread you linked, one issue is the archive template parameters on the page in question. Softlavender (talk) 23:46, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
  • One-click archiver does as it's told, and what tells it is User:MiszaBot/config. Cluebot uses a different config template. So, check the Miszabot template and make sure it matches the Cluebot template. Add a Miszabot template if it doesn't exist, otherwise one-click-archiver will just guess. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 01:15, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Redr template giving incorrect advice

I noticed that at Miley cyrus, it says "Please do not replace these redirected links" just because it is semi-protected. I don't understand what's the reasoning behind that advice. Most people, including vandals, would reach the target rather than the redirect page, which would also be protected if necessary. Anyway, in this case, the links should be replaced with the correct form, because it is simply wrong. (I'm not sure why it exists anyway. Are we going to create redirects for every single person with their last name lowercased?) nyuszika7h (talk) 20:46, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

The text is from {{R semi-protected}} by Paine Ellsworth. I don't know why the quoted text is there. The redirect was made in 2006 where the go feature of the search box was case sensitive so without a redirect, a search on Miley cyrus or miley cyrus would have given a page of search results instead of going directly to Miley Cyrus. Many such redirects seem pointless today but redirects are cheap. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:25, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
To editor Nyuszika7h: Thank you for the ping, PrimeHunter – I think all the protection rcats are worded that way, so I'll look into changing them because there are many cases like the Myley cyrus redirect. The miscatorization rcat tells people the right thing to do; however, these cases can be misleading and confusing. Good catch, nyuszika7h!  What's in your palette? Paine  06:58, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Posting of DYK on talk page and user page

This DYK article Template:Did you know nominations/Shumen Plateau Nature Park posted by me is presently in the lead on the main page. But it is not reported either on the talk page of the article or on my user page. There seems to be some technical hitch. Could you please look into it and see how it can be rectified and I get the article's endorsement on my talk page? Similarly, GA review notifications and a GA approval also do not appear on my talk page. Can these issue be resolved, please?--Nvvchar. 05:47, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot missed two runs so {{Did you know}} was updated manually without the associated talk edits. The operator said "DYKUpdateBot is back in action!" four hours ago at User talk:Shubinator#DYKUpdateBot stopped. The next run would usually be around 12:00 (UTC). I don't know whether it will make the missed talk edits but wait and see for now. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:40, 17 June 2016 (UTC)l
@Shubinator: Can DYKUpdateBot do it retroactively or should it be manual? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:57, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
  • @Shubinator: Thanks. It is posted now on article talk page and my talk page.Nvvchar. 14:17, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks Maile66 for doing it manually: Special:Contributions/Maile66. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:27, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
@Nvvchar, PrimeHunter, and Legoktm: the Good Article nominations are monitored by a different bot. As mentioned on WT:GAN, for reasons not yet known, that bot has been running but skipping GA. Legoktm has not edited in two days, and he's the one to take care of this issue. — Maile (talk) 14:53, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Magic word question

Is the a magic word that will return a value that equals the page which the magic word is placed rather than the name of the page where the magic word is transcluded? To better explain what I am trying to do as an example, let's say that I have pages "Foo A" and "Foo B": This magic word would be placed on "Foo A". "Foo A" would then be transcluded on "Foo B". The magic word should allow the value of "Foo A" appear on "Foo B" when it appears on "Foo B". (So, magic words like {{PAGENAME}}, {{FULLPAGENAME}} cannot do this since when viewing the transclusion of "Foo A" on "Foo B", they would return the related values of "Foo B" instead of "Foo A" in these scenarios.) Steel1943 (talk) 18:26, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Why do you want to do that? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:33, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I'm trying to make some edits to Template:Rfd2 that require this specific type of functionality. Last year, I made some edits to it to help with the creation of autopopulated edit notices in the event that a discussion is relisted, but in the process, had to hardcode instances of {{PAGENAME}} in the template as well as disable the related links when viewed directly from Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion since clicking on them from that page would not autopopulate the daily subpage's name into the edit notice due to the {{PAGENAME}} returning the value of the page which it is being viewed instead of the page which it is placed. (Previously, when the template was placed, the instances of {{PAGENAME}} were substituted when the Template:Rfd2 was substituted, but if that discussion ended up being relisted, then those links that were reliant on the substitutions of {{PAGENAME}} world no longer be correct, creating a broken link in the autopopulated edit notices.) And thus, the reason I'm asking if such a magic word exists. Steel1943 (talk) 18:43, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Could hardcode an instance using {{#ifeq:{{PAGENAME}}|NAMEOFPAGE|actionX|actionY}}? --Izno (talk) 18:38, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) @Izno: Unfortunately, that wouldn't work because that function would still be reliant on the page being viewed. See my explanation above. Steel1943 (talk) 18:46, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
How about the magic-word param? See first "Note:'" under the first table at Help:Magic words#Variables. I used the magic-word param in the {{Talk page of redirect}} template, and it works sort of like, well, magic.  What's in your palette? Paine  19:05, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Paine, after reviewing that note, that idea unfortunately wouldn't seem to work either since that would still require either a substitution or a hardcoded instance of {{PAGENAME}} or one of its related words. When a discussion is relisted on WP:XFD forums that use daily subpages (such as WP:RFD), the subpage which the discussion appears changes when the discussion is relisted. (Which is why the template currently uses hardcoded instances of {{PAGENAME}}: to allow the value to automatically change when the discussion is relisted.) Steel1943 (talk) 19:15, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Makes me wonder if there might be something about Fred's recently closed proposal that would help with this?  What's in your palette? Paine  21:52, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Gnarly little challenge. Earlier I was thinking about an adaptation of Izno's idea above:
  • {{#ifeq:{{PAGENAME}}|{{safesubst:PAGENAME}}|actionX|actionY}}
Nah.  What's in your palette? Paine  22:01, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
There is no such magic word. It would for example be helpful in navboxes with V T E (view, talk, edit) links. They currently need a name parameter to tell them their own name so the links go to the right place. The parameter is frequently wrong so we have Wikipedia:Database reports/Invalid Navbar links. A template move requires updating of the parameter like [22]. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:45, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
That's what I thought. Is the addition of such a magic word even possible through the wiki software used here (like as a gerrit request or however that is done?) I'd have to imagine that such a question has been brought up in the past. Steel1943 (talk) 19:07, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Anything can be requested at phab:.
Subst:PAGENAME isn't going to work when you want the page name to change if the RFD gets relisted (and therefore moved to a new date). I think what you really want is the advanced features for WP:Flow, which was originally envisioned as being a workflow tool that could handle everything at XFD from nominations and alerts through discussion and even reporting that it's time to close or re-list at the end, and make all of that work as efficient as possible for the admin. (Think Super-Twinkle for XFD.  ;-) Unfortunately, that's not going to be available this year.
In the meantime, perhaps a bot or AWB-style script could handle this? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Signature timestamp does not agree with page history and watchlist

This edit by me shews in the page history and on my watchlist as having been made at 00:07, but the signature says 00:06. What is occurring? DuncanHill (talk) 00:20, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

There is often a 1 minute difference and sometimes more. I have seen 4 minutes.[23] It seems harmless so just ignore it. The time shown in logs (page histories, user contributions, watchlists, recent changes and so on) should always be the same. The time in a signature is registered at a different time, possibly by a different server. It is stored as wikitext and becomes an editable part of the page just like if the user had written it manually. It doesn't matter whether it's a little off. See also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#2 minutes difference between time in signature and history. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:56, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks - looks like I was quite active on VPT at the time but I have no memory of that thread! DuncanHill (talk) 01:02, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

"Edits by user" down

Attempt to use "Edits by user" at Shooting of Michael Brown produces "Found 0 edits by on Shooting of Michael Brown (0.0% of the total edits made to the page)". Search of VP archives tells me little but the fact that this is another thing that goes down a lot. Is there anything that can be done to bring it back up? Is there anything that can be done to prevent it from going down a lot? Why do working infrastructure tools break? Thank you. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:35, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

On second thought, I was expecting this to list the major contributors to the article, in descending sequence. Am I looking in the wrong place? Is "Edits by user" only for a single user? If so, that link could be clarified as "Edits by a user", perhaps. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:52, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Found it in "Revision history statistics" Never mind. This could be removed as useless brain fart, or retained as education for other uninformed people like me. Over and out. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:56, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Greater color contrast ratio

In regards to the use of {{Greater color contrast ratio}}, why does it not work when the first parameter is another template that returns a colour? It always picks the third parameter. For example (it IS meant to return white):

Alex|The|Whovian? 14:13, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

@AlexTheWhovian: {{NarniaColor|England}} is outputting <nowiki>#B30000</nowiki>, which is input to Lua as a strip marker. If you use mw.text.unstripNoWiki then Lua can convert the strip marker back to the original text of #B30000. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:47, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
And this edit seems to have fixed things. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:56, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
@Mr. Stradivarius: My thanks. Alex|The|Whovian? 15:11, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Cascading semiprotection

WP:CASCADE says nothing about cascading semiprotection. Does anyone know where I could find a simple writeup that discusses why we don't have it? I remember that there was some sort of bug, whereby anyone could semiprotect a template by transcluding it onto the page with CC-SP enabled, but I'd like to see a page giving a better description than I could give. Nyttend (talk) 13:34, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

  • Security reasons, basically: By cascade semi protecting a page, every editor who can edit semi protected pages could semi protect other pages by simply transcluding them in such a cascade protected page. Your memory is fairly accurate, it's been referred to in Phabricator phab:T10658.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 13:40, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
    • How does one search Phabricator? It runs in my mind that there was a much older bug request, in which someone had discovered the security flaw (when CC-SP was still an option) and filed an emergency request that got marked as "Unbreak Now!" and was fixed rather quickly because of the security issues. I've searched for such a thing, but I couldn't find it. Nyttend (talk) 15:38, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
      • Via the search box, but you have to check for "Closed" issues. I am guessing you refer to phab:T10796.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:29, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
        • That's it; I used the search box, but I wasn't aware that I had to specify closed bugs. Final request — how do I find "bug 8658" that's mentioned in T10796? Apparently the bugs got renumbered when they switched from Bugzilla to Phabricator, because phab:T8658 is a problem with running update.php that has nothing to do with this. Nyttend (talk) 18:52, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
          • I believe you add 2000 to the number - is it phab:T10658 you're looking for? BethNaught (talk) 18:55, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
            • Yes, that's it, but I found it independently and was planning to report it here so you didn't have to look. I just added something to WP:CASCADE explaining why CC-SP isn't an option and linking to 10796, and in the process noticed that the policy still has some Bugzilla links, e.g. Bugzilla:8658. This auto-redirects to the relevant Phabricator ticket, which indeed is 10658. I'm surprised (the toolserver pages became 404 errors when they took it down, so I assumed that Bugzilla also wouldn't work), but it's nice. Nyttend (talk) 18:59, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Move an article back

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G VR redirects to a very short version of the name. I think it should be moved back to the full name, but I think that a move cannot be done to an article that already exists, right? How can this be done? (And do you agree that it should be done?) Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 16:51, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Administrators can move over a redirect with a page history by deleting it. Others can request it. See Wikipedia:Requested moves. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:22, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, done. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 20:35, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
  Resolved

Line-breaks in Special:Contributions search-options box

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T138159

The "Search for contributions" box where one selects username, namespaces, various checkboxes, etc causes side-scrolling on small monitors. The underlying cause seems to be that each row of controls cannot line-break. It's good that there is no break between a checkbox and its label (&nbsp; is used), and reasonable not to break within a label (class mw-input-with-label sets white-space:nowrap). But there is also no possibility to break between a label and the next checkbox, which means that whole

□ Deleted only □ Only show edits that are latest revisions □ Only show edits that are page creations □ Hide minor edits

line can be forced to run wider than my window. Compare that to the analogous "Watchlist options" box in Special:Watchlist, where breaks can occur among the different "Hide:" options. There, we have a whitespace between each subsequent <span class="mw-input-with-label">...</span>. Where does one fix the Contributions layout? DMacks (talk) 21:04, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

The spans with class mw-input-with-label have nowrap set by way of CSS from the mediaiki.legacy.shared stylesheet. That file is part of the software. We could override it with with local CSS in Common.css, and file a bug to have it fixed. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:16, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Maybe I tangled the explanation here. That CSS class itself is fine. But the page that uses it (whatever generates Special:Contributions itself) should insert a space between the consecutive spans that use it. That is:
<span class="mw-input-with-label">...</span><span class="mw-input-with-label">...</span>
should insert a space ( ):
<span class="mw-input-with-label">...</span> <span class="mw-input-with-label">...</span>
DMacks (talk) 21:50, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
The page is generated in core (SpecialContributions.php). -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:19, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks! Beyond my understanding of the internals, so Phab'ed. DMacks (talk) 03:24, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Question mark renders in read mode without being added in edit mode

In the read mode of my edit, the sentence "Cyprus is located just 75? km to the south of Turkey" has a question mark after the number "75". But if you look at what I actually wrote in the diff, I did not add a question mark after "75". In a subsequent edit, I removed the question mark but the actual diff shows no question mark being removed. How can this happen? Dr. K. 21:55, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

The character in question was a U+007F <control-007F>... No idea what it does, but may show as a question mark by some systems. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:29, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Thank you Edokter. I cannot see any character at all. How did you identify it and how did that character go into the edit? Dr. K. 22:37, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
7F is the good old "delete" character (bottom right corner of this chart). In the days of paper tape input, if a character was punched incorrectly, you'd punch a row of holes across the tape at that point and the character would be ignored. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:01, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
I see. Thank you very much Redrose64. That explains my questions. Dr. K. 23:15, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
I use the tool http://r12a.github.io/apps/conversion/ (unrelated to WMF or wikis) to get information about special characters. Copy-paste a string to the "Characters" field and click "View in Uniview". In this case MediaWiki changes the character so you would have to copy the string with 75 km from the diff and not the rendered page. Some browsers may also change certain special characters when copy-pasting but this case works for me in Firefox. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:04, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
I myself use the Unicode Analyzer extension for Chrome. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:32, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Route diagram templates in mobile view

Since… well, when the mobile view was implemented, the display of route diagram templates used in railway line articles and canal articles has been completely broken, probably because of table CSS. How could this be fixed (either through modifying the templates themselves, if possible, or MediaWiki:Common.css)? Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 16:11, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

In mobile view, tables are given a 1em top- and bottom margins. Setting a zero margin (inline) on the inner tables should clear any broken display. (And I strongly advice getting rid of the <center> tags.) -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:42, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
@Edokter: Thanks; I've fixed that in {{Routemap}} and several of the auxiliary templates which are used in it (but not yet {{BS-map}} or the legacy {{BS-table}} group). (The padding on the sides isn't perfect, but it's usable. I'm honestly quite surprised that no one's bothered to fix it since 2012.) However, the collapsible rows option (example; see diagrams 4.1, 4.2 and 6.2) still isn't working; is collapsibility entirely disabled in mobile view? Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 14:33, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
There also seem to be some remaining issues with the display of {{BSto}} inside infoboxes. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 14:44, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
All I know is that tables in mobile view have different styling then desktop, and that it often clashes with templates using wikitables. Mobile view does not load Common.css/.js, so anything template related there, like collapsing, is usually not loaded in mobile (unless copied to Mobile.css). The collapsing functionality provided by MediaWiki itself (mw-collapsible) might work, but I have not tested. I am not that deep into mobile. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:30, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-25

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

Recent changes

  • Notifications were not always marked as read when you followed a link from an email notification. This will now happen. [24]

Changes this week

  • The list of other languages an article is available in will be shorter on small Wikipedias and non-Wikipedia projects. This is to make it easier to find the most relevant languages for each user. You will still be able to see the other languages. [25][26]
  • Alerts (the red badge) will not be automatically marked as read when you open the Notifications popup. [27]
  • When you get several thanks you can see them as one notification. This is instead of one notification for each thanks. [28]
  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).

Meetings

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

19:14, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Markup renders as

The technique at User:Iceblock/Markup-render may be useful for Template:Markup and probably other places too.

Try the user template by, for example, typing {{subst:user:iceblock/Markup-render|{{CURRENTYEAR}}}} inside table markup (brace and pipe, and pipe and brace). This will result in |- | {{CURRENTYEAR}} | 2024

Iceblock (talk) 21:30, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Compact language list

There probably will be questions, so... If you don't like those compact language links, you can disable them at Preferences section "Languages" at the bottom of page. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:37, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

The change was already reverted. --Stryn (talk) 17:36, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the note. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:14, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
When Compact Language Links is deployed, the setting to disable/enable it will be under the heading "Languages" at the bottom of the Appearance tab (or equivalent for your language) in your preferences.
The deployment schedule is at phabricator:T136677. --Pipetricker (talk) 08:39, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Can't set up vandal fighter

I can't set up last version of vandal fighter with mac os, no way to automatically detect my browser (chrome), with manual setting up of the browser can't find the right file. How to resolve this issue? Thanks, bye.--Giacomo Seics (talk) 14:43, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

@Giacomo Seics:   Have you tried the Computing section of Wikipedia's Reference Desk? They specialize in answering knowledge questions there; this help desk is only for technical issues with Wikipedia. For your convenience, here is the link to post a question there: click here. I hope this helps. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:22, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Preview-only template warnings using REVISIONID magic word

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T137900

I've noticed several heavily used templates using the hack of checking if REVISIONID is empty to detect preview mode in order to show excess/misused template parameters, namely:

  • Module:Check for unknown parameters
  • Module:Convert
  • Module:Citation/CS1
  • Module:TemplatePar

A few templates also use Module:If_preview for the same reason.

These have the side effect of causing an extra parse on page edit and disabling the edit stash mechanism (pre-parsing the page as the user types the edit summary or otherwise looks like they might press save soon). A few suggestions were made for how to mitigate this. This affects a large percentage of pages and negatively impacts page save time performance.

The use of REVISIONID (and REVISIONTIMESTAMP likewise) should never really occur given the performance impact. It should probably be disabled server side at some point, since it's basically just a pitfall in the waiting.

I think CSS based hiding and/or HTML comments would work fine, leaving the HTML the same regardless of preview. I see that Module:Check_for_unknown_parameters already adds a tracking category to pages, which seems like it would work well when combined with comments/warnings that pinpoint what part of pages have parameter problems. Are there any experienced template editors interested in fixing these templates and modules? Aaron Schulz 19:35, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 145#"Under Title" issue. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:50, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
HTML comments should avoid the Google and internal search index pollution. Aaron Schulz 20:28, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
Aaron, could you please look at #Time comparison, if you have general concerns about using REVISIONTIMESTAMP in templates? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:29, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
There is magic word and parser function for REVISIONTIMESTAMP (the later takes a title argument). The parser function is fine unless the page itself is used as the title. It's only when the revision id/time of a page itself is in that page's content that parsing becomes duplicated and impossible to cache. Aaron Schulz 01:08, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
For those wanting to know the background, convert recently (1 June 2016) switched to using REVISIONID so someone adding converts has a better chance of seeing an error. The following shows what "the statue is {{convert|12|m|junk}} high" looks like in preview and in a saved article.
the statue is 12 metres (Error in convert: Unit name "junk" is not known (help)) high
the statue is 12 metres ([convert: unknown unit]) high
It might be ok to put a message at the top of the page saying there is a problem providing there is an anchor at the place of the problem so the message could link to it. The anchor could be left in the page if it were saved with an error, and the anchor could be the same for each error so the link only goes to the first occurrence. Johnuniq (talk) 00:36, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
I would just output a big red error message every time. Now that Category:Convert errors is empty the error message should only appear in a few articles, and if anyone saves an edit with a big red error message it should get fixed pretty quickly. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:08, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Pinging Trappist the monk because of the Citation/CS1 connection. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:15, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Module:Citation/CS1 uses the preview detection as an editor-aid for the case where a link to Internet Archive is malformed. When one of those links is malformed, the module rewrites the link to point to a directory page at the archive so that the editor may choose an appropriate snapshot. Right now, every invoke of the module inpect the revision timestamp. I suspect that this could be changed so that revision timestamp is inspected only when there is an applicable error.
Clearly there is a desire for preview-only messaging. What happens if a module that needs to know about preview mode got the value of REVISIONID passed to it in the {{#invoke:Module|function|{{REVISIONID}}? Is this still 'bad'? MediaWiki knows that it is rendering a preview, can it not provide an 'environment' sort of table that modules could query for this and perhaps other useful information?
—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:06, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
There is a patch proposing a magic word to expose preview mode as one experimental option at T137900, but momentum there seems to be toward exposing a method to register errors in Lua (I merged a patch for that, but that method does not yet give location context, which Jackmcbarn is looking into). Deferring the REVISIONID call until errors are discovered is probably the best short-term workaround. Aaron Schulz 20:46, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Good, and Module:Citation/CS1 also uses hidden-text CSS to always have "invisible" warning messages displayed with custom CSS by wp:wikignomes or other users wanting to view the hidden CS1-cite warnings on live pages. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:10, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
I have implemented module:TemplatePar in several templates, especially for this helpful preview-warning. Adding a tracking category is not an alternative (it is a ´´parallel´´ error handling). I understand I can expect a software change or meta-module editing (or is this usage deprecated and should I edit my editor-level templates)? I`ll follow this. -DePiep (talk) 09:01, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I am the author of Module:TemplatePar.

  • I don’t think there is a performance “problem”.
  • REVISIONID would be touched, if ever, only in case of errors.
    • Just don’t make errors.
    • If any error on template usage arrives, the target is to eliminate the mistake asap.
    • If no error, no cache issues are in question.
  • There are various methods to deal with detected faults.
    • See de:Wikipedia:Lua/Modul/TemplatePar/en #error handling.
    • On error detection
      1. a maintenance category may be thrown and/or
      2. an error message may be displayed in red
        • always visible
        • always but hidden
        • never
        • on preview only.
    • The last case is the only one that utilizes current REVISIONID, and only if there is a problem to be reported.

Greetings --PerfektesChaos (talk) 11:33, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I can confirm the lightning-fast SAVE, after edit-preview with clean infoboxes having Module:TemplatePar to check for invalid parameter names. In fact, I was ultra-shocked at how fast (2 seconds) the edit-save operation of a large page occurred (after edit-preview), not aware then of the pre-processed templates and style cache which allowed the edit-save to instantly display the saved page. -Wikid77 (talk)

Pinging Frietjes for the unknown parameter module. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:51, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

if there is an alternative way to show an error only in preview, then we can certainly put that in Module:Check for unknown parameters. we can also invert the if logic to put try to make sure the REVISIONID check happens only when there is output from the module. Frietjes (talk) 16:07, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
pinging Evad37 who is using Module:If preview in 650 or so articles. Frietjes (talk) 17:34, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
My use case was to provide some help/information links for editors at the bottom of an infobox, without them being visible for readers – I never realised using REVISIONID was a big deal. Is ~650 pages alright for the short term (until there's another magic word or lua method)? - Evad37 [talk] 02:10, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Since it's probably not obvious to everyone, I want to point out Aaron's not just a random volunteer. Aaron and his four teammates are the people whose primary job duties involve deciding whether something constitutes a WP:PERFORMANCE problem. We don't need to worry about performance, but Aaron does. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:31, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

It might have helped if he had posted with his WMF tag. :D --Izno (talk) 18:39, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Special:CentralAuth/Aaron Schulz (WMF) seems a bit thin compared to Special:CentralAuth/Aaron Schulz. :D PrimeHunter (talk) 18:59, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

One thing someone noted above is calling the magic word only when an error is actually known to have happened. As long as there is also a tracking category in all such cases when the error is saved (so people can keep the number of affected pages very low), this could be a good short-term work around. Given how often the server logs are reported vary_revision disabling edit stashing (and also leading to double parsing on page views incidentally), there are either errors on a huge percent of articles or the magic word is used unconditionally for many modules. Aaron Schulz 19:44, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

It looks like Module:Citation/CS1 is unconditionally checking REVISIONID. The checks could be done via a method call and deferred until errors are already known like some of the other modules. Aaron Schulz 20:31, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Module:Convert only reads REVISIONID if about to output an error message. It adds a tracking category if the page is an article (namespace 0), and the category is usually empty, or may have half a dozen pages for a few days. I guess that means there is no problem with convert continuing the way it is? Johnuniq (talk) 00:16, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Are we sure that this is a problem? At Help talk:Citation Style 1#archive url checks and preview mode, Editor Aaron Schulz provided a link to a page of graphs, in particular saveTiming, that purport to illustrate performance (I guess) where the x-axis is readily identifiable as date/time, but the y-axis is just a meaningless (to me) number. The claim is that use of {{REVISIONID}} is detrimental to system performance. Module:Citation/CS1 started using that magic word at 17:42, 4 June 2016 (UTC) so any detrimental effect should be noticeable in the saveTiming graph if scaled to the most recent month, which see.

It is not clear to me that there was a substantial spike or level change in the graph as a result of adding {{REVISIONID}} detection to Module:Citation/CS1.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:38, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

There are too many things going on in that time period. I'd defer the REVISIONID until errors are known and watch the graph after making that change. Aaron Schulz 18:14, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
To confirm, I have noticed, during the prior 2 weeks, how edit-save of many pages with clean wp:CS1 cites (after edit-preview) has always seemed slower, compared to pages with only infoboxes where the edit-preview evidently generated a cache to enable rapid edit-save (displayed within 2 seconds of click "Save page"), even for a large page with large infobox(es), an instant save. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:10, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

WP articles >1366pix width (31% of users have this size) don't show well, is there an easy way to find >1366pix WP pages?

This morning I reduced the headers on a couple of columns (to reduce the column-width) so the chart in an article would fit on a common laptop display. Only about 1/4 of all computer screens are <1366pix but 31% of users have 1366p screens. Is there an easy way to find other pages on WP that are >1366pix so they may be easily fixed to fit?

Are there any WP policies on page-width? Raquel Baranow (talk) 22:14, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

FI: The article mentioned above is Epidemiology of motor vehicle collisions.
I don't think this is something we need to be overly concerned with (within reason), as browsers are designed to allow easy navigation of varied sizes and shapes of page. Wikipedia's HTML markup is carefully parsed to ensure it's compatible with even ancient technology. An issue we cannot do anything about is how the user sets their browser's user-agent i.e. their text could always be much larger or smaller than normal, and we have no way to detect it or force them to use our size (for essential accessibility reasons). This means that no matter what efforts we make to have content be of a specific size, it simply won't be for everyone.
IMO: It's far more important that the content is semantically correct, than looking pretty. Although every effort should be made (within reason) to maintain a clean and aesthetically pleasing layout, if a table needs to be e.g. 4000px wide to make sense, then it should be. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 14:36, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
One of the basic principles about web design is that you should assume nothing about the other person's system setup. They might not have the same hardware as you; they might not have the same screen dimensions; they might not have the same operating system or browser; they might not have the same fonts installed. If even one of these differs from your own, they will see tables differently. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:28, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
I wouldn't worry too much about this. Wide tables are notoriously problematic, but they do 'work'. I'd focus on putting less data in tables and more in prose, and hopefully at some point, we can improve the table viewing for smaller form factor devices, but those will always be problematic. (Try viewing a large spreadsheet on a phone). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:00, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Edit summary and <Enter>

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T15065

I wrote an edit summary after editing an article and without thinking pressed the Enter key. To my horror, the edit was saved before I could vet it with Show preview. I can't recall hearing of any prior complaint, but it seems to me that it's bad policy to allow a stray finger to hit Enter, and one should be forced to make a deliberate and conscious save by moving the cursor and clicking Save page. Akld guy (talk) 02:37, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Hitting Enter while the cursor is in the "edit summary" text box has always saved the edit outright, and it's been helpful to me (and many others I'm sure). Perhaps there could be a preference that could change the default behaviour from "save edit" to "show preview". ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 03:32, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
This has been declined previously, it should be able to be made with a user javascript - not sure if someone has made one? — xaosflux Talk 03:48, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
I'm using User:Anomie/nosubmitsummary.js to disable the enter key. -- John of Reading (talk) 06:22, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. That's a very very old Phabricator ticket. I guess it's pointless starting another, so I'll just go with the flow and take no special precautions to avoid hitting Enter; carelessness is sure to increase my edit count and who cares if there's extra server traffic and wear & tear on Wikipedia's storage media as a result :) Akld guy (talk) 23:15, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
Probably no one to be honest: don't worry about performance. —  crh 23  (Talk) 12:22, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
Does that .js listed above solve your needs? If enough people want it, it could be turned in to a gadget. I know some other projects default to require preview before save - personally I hate that feature when I have to go to a language I don't know and for some reason to contact someone. — xaosflux Talk 13:19, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
I've been using it for lots of months, and it's stopped me fubar-ing several times. I almost built it into other scripts I use, but am lazy ;-) Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 14:04, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: I'm not suggesting that the default behavior should be changed, merely that the Enter key function be removed. That would avoid inadvertent saves by careless fingers, and would force user to deliberately move the cursor to Show preview or Save page and click. His/her choice, as current. Akld guy (talk) 20:40, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
For enwiki, we have a few options: (1)Users can do this themselves - see the code snippet above, you can add this to your own .js file to try it out. (Let me know if you need help). (2) We could make this a gadget to turn on and off via preferences/gadgets; (3) We could change this site-wide (don't think we will get mass support for that). — xaosflux Talk 21:59, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
It is a common feature of browsers that the submit button of a form is triggered by the Enter key. This is also brings accessibility features (or rather, removing that would mess with the expectations of people who rely on keyboard navigation for accessibility reasons). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:05, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Talk pages in Google

Should wikipedia talk pages be showing up in google searches? For example a search for Ceropegia nampyana (without quotes) just now turned up a link to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 14:56, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

AFAIK this is expected behaviour: search engine indexing is controlled by the __NOINDEX__ magic word, and WP:Controlling search engine indexing says basically that everything except things in userspace or draftspace is indexed by default, with a few exceptions. —  crh 23  (Talk) 16:33, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, they rank a lot lower than article pages, so that's why you might not have noticed one before, but they are indexed. I regularly use google to look for specific things in talk pages. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:14, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

history revision

Softlavender (or whomever has a moment) the edit counter is having some problems apparently on wiki en, thank you--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:07, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

New Tool to Help Transfer Files to Commons: MTC!

Hi all, I have written a new tool, MTC!, to help transfer free files to Commons. I'm looking for some victims beta-testers to help test and/or provide feedback about the tool. Please try it out, have fun, and let me know how it goes! :) -FASTILY 11:32, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Notices on banned users' talk pages

I followed a rabbit trail and ended up at User talk:Technical 13, wanting to find a link to an arbitration page (presumably left by the user who blocked him most recently), but the history is clogged up with lots of deletion notices that obviously won't get a response from this indef-blocked user. Would it be possible for us to reconfigure the auto-notify scripts so that they don't leave notes on the talk pages of indef-blocked users? It seems rather pointless to give full protection to a user talk page just to ward off notices of "your page has been nominated for XFD", especially as it wouldn't impede such notifications when the nominator's an admin, and with most indef-blocked users (this one being an exception) there's no good reason to prevent them from making {{unblock}} requests at their talk pages. Nyttend (talk) 19:16, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. I would like to point out, though, that at least Twinkle, when used by an admin, will give a warning about editing a fully protected page and allow the user to skip that step. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:12, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
Adding AFD notices to the {{bots}} template might help. AWB respects that; I don't know if Twinkle also does. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:05, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Search box no longer accepts pages titles?

Every time I enter a page, I end up on the search page(!). What gives? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:32, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Never mind, javascript was disabled. Still begs the question: why do I need javascript to navigate to a page directly? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:36, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Can you be a little more specific? With javascript disabled when loading a page are you finding the focus on the search input box? — xaosflux Talk 14:44, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
OK I duplicated this, however it is not consistent - with javascript disabled, but using monobook it seems to work (e.g. searching for "Heat" goes to Heat not the results) - but with Vector it goes to the results page. — xaosflux Talk 14:52, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
If memory serves, this was one of the old complaints about Vector: Monobook's default is "Go", and Vector's default is "Search". (Monobook's search box has two buttons under it.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
Annoyingly, at commons:, the default is "Search" even in MonoBook. You need to make a conscious effort to click the "Go" button, which isn't always easy if the drop-down suggestions are hiding the buttons. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:33, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Twinkle and Urdu wp

User:Hindustanilanguage and I have been looking at an issue related to user notification on Urdu WP. It seems that Twinkle does not warn the page creator or create the AfD page on the Urdu WP. I am not verzed enough in either Twinkle or Urdu to give much help.

Any ideas?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 09:36, 23 June 2016 (UTC).

MW Error message when undoing "content model" change

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T75490

I accidentally changed some dude's userpage "content model" from wikitext to JavaScript: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Anthonymous&action=history.

I tried undoing the edit (clicking undo, which tried to load https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Anthonymous&action=edit&undoafter=725974851&undo=725974869), but received a MediaWiki error message:

  • [V2YW0ApAMFMAAJQqpJAAAABL] 2016-06-19 03:51:44: Fatal exception of type MWException

Using the built-in "rollback" function (not Twinkle's version, which I haven't tried) successfully reverted the change, though. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 03:55, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

For future reference: mw:Help:ChangeContentModel; you can always revert from the log page. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:40, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
Here are 2 other ways to revert a content model change: you can either use Special:ChangeContentModel again to change the content model from JavaScript back to wikitext, or you can delete the page and then undelete all revisions except the content model change. 24.205.8.104 (talk) 14:10, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
  • I know of the workarounds, but it remains that "rollback works, undo throws a fatal MW error" is not a desirable situation. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 17:58, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
  • This smells a lot like phab:T75490 - which apparently was closed as a wont fix? — xaosflux Talk 22:30, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
    • As Salvidrim said, "throws a fatal MW error" is not a desirable situation. T75490 seems to have been closed on the basis that it was about being unable to revert such edits at all and that ability was made available, not noticing that the normal undo link still throws exceptions (I also see that some exception-throwing was fixed as T73163). Anomie⚔ 15:22, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
  • I'll look into the exception, but how do you "accidentally" change the content model of a page? Legoktm (talk) 22:29, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
  • By being a klutz like me. I intended to test the "change content model" on my sandbox page to test out stuff but accidentally did it on some guy's userpage. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 17:02, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

Article count down

I was surprised when looking at my article count to see that it said I'd only created 383, when I've kept an accurate count and should have over 400. Doing a spot check, I found that articles I'd created from betwen 12 October 2008 and December 2008 no longer appear. For example this and this etc, no longer appear in my count. I assume that this doesn't only affect me. Any reason? Valenciano (talk) 15:00, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

@Valenciano: Looks like a problem with the tool, or the database copy it is working off of, not with enwiki. Your article creations contributions list does show the pages you referenced above. @Cyberpower678: or @MusikAnimal: do you have any info that may help? — xaosflux Talk 13:16, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
I heard a rumor that the DBs on labs are suffering from corruption, and that the problem is getting worse. I can't confirm that though at current.—cyberpowerChat:Online 13:57, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
Yeah it seems to be an issue with X!tools and the "missing" articles seem to date from late 2008. Valenciano (talk) 13:59, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
See T134203 for more details, indeed there is some data drift in the database - which xtools works off of. ~ Matthewrbowker Drop me a note 20:43, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

Google actively blocking an innocuous Wikipedia article

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T106793

Google Search results are actively blocking the Wikipedia article Tommy's Honour, even though it comes up very easily (top four of the results) on Bing [29] and Yahoo [30] searches. The "Tommy's Honour" Wikipedia article does not even show up on a site-specific search (even though every Wikipedia article or category the title is mentioned comes up): [31].

Even if I search for a specific phrase which has been in the live article from the beginning, it doesn't come up on Google: [32], although again it does come up on Bing [33] and Yahoo [34].

Why is this? The article is more than a week old, and I have checked every day and it has been blocked on Google from the beginning, even though every other article on Wikipedia comes up on a Google search within minutes of its creation.

Can anyone figure this out? As far as I can tell there are no codes or magic words in the article that would cause this, but maybe someone with tech savvy can check further. As far as I can tell, I have been the only one editing the article or its talk page except for a category added.

Thanks for any help. Softlavender (talk) 08:08, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Sometimes it takes a while before Google picks up on a new article. A week is not common, but not impossible either. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:12, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
In my experience that might have been true 7 to 10 years ago, but nowadays Google picks up Wikipedia changes and articles instantly. In my opinion there's no reason why Bing and Yahoo would index the article but Google would actively skip over it except something is blocking it or there is some error involved. Softlavender (talk) 09:45, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
It looks to me like Google is currently unable to read pages with an apostrophe in the title. See phab:T106793: "Pages with single quote in title are inaccessible by some clients (redirect loop)". I tried 10 articles with an apostrophe created two days ago:
None of them were found by Google. I also tried 10 pages with no apostrophe and all except ‎Ruggles Beach, Ohio were found. In addition, if a Google search like https://www.google.com/search?q=O'Reilly+site:https://en.wikipedia.org finds older articles with an apostrophe then none of the cases I tested have a "cached" link on the green triangle after the url. Other articles have that. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:42, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, what PH said; punctuation in titles confuses Google's crawlers. I've just created Tommys Honour as a redirect, which Google ought to pick up within half an hour or so, although its pagerank is likely to be fairly low. ‑ Iridescent 10:49, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
Yup, tommy's honour site:wikipedia.org now working as a Google search term. The same "create a redirect with no punctuation" trick will work on any page Google's ignoring. ‑ Iridescent 10:51, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
Iridescent, Google never blocked mention of the article within Wikipedia; it's blocking the article itself. Please click all the links in my OP. Softlavender (talk) 10:54, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
Yes, which per my comment above I've now fixed for you. Google's crawlers don't index pages with apostrophes in the title, so if you want a page to show on Google you need to create an unpunctuated version of the title as a redirect, which I've now done. Tommy's Honour site:wikipedia.org is now showing the correct article as the first hit. (Searching just "Tommy's Honour" without the site.wikipedia is currently showing the Wikipedia page on p4 of the results, but that's because the redirect has only just been created; it will rise through the pageranks quite quickly as people visit it.) ‑ Iridescent 10:58, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
OK looking a tiny bit better now. Thanks very much for your help. Softlavender (talk) 11:20, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
  • I have created a thread on this issue on Google Help Forums: [35]. Evidently Google has known about the issue for at least 8 months. -- Softlavender (talk) 13:44, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi :Softlavender, The article also does not display Wikipedia's Page view statistics (all days are 0): https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-20&pages=Tommy's_Honour

I have posted about the wikipedia problem at: Wikipedia:Help_desk#wmflabs_Pageviews_Analysis_broken.3F. Ottawahitech (talk) 20:51, 22 June 2016 (UTC)please ping me

Ottawahitech, I've been checking page-views daily on that article and it has always worked. However today for some reason the page-views don't show up unless you actively choose a specific date-range, at which point the page-views do show up. I'm not sure if other articles are having this issue. Softlavender (talk) 05:38, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
  • Iridescent, the article is back to being fully blocked on Google, even with a site-specific search or phrase-within-article search. Softlavender (talk) 05:44, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

Before we start a massive redirect creation effort, I'd like to do a bit more research.

For example, I just did a Google search for Connecticut Huskies women: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=strict&q=+Connecticut+Huskies+women

and the first page of results includes:

How does this square with the claim that titles with apostrophes are not indexed?--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:48, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

That said, I do not see:
or others in the first ten pages of results.--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:53, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
Sphilbrick: (1) The redirect solution doesn't work, as I informed Iridescent above. It worked for a few hours but Google is again completely blocking the article he made a redirect for. (2) The Google issue has only existed recently. The articles that are blocked are articles that were created after the onset of the problem. The articles that you are seeing that do appear on Google were created before the problem started. All of the articles you are looking for are indexed by Google and will come up if you use quotation marks in the search. Try looking for more recently created articles with apostrophes, and use quotation marks when you search (that's the only way to determine whether Google is indexing it; without quotation marks you are going to get a random assortment of results). Softlavender (talk) 23:27, 23 June 2016 (UTC); edited 23:52, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

Disenrolling from course

I have enrolled in Education Program:Hanyang University/Sociology of Everyday Life (Spring 2016) by mistake but when I try to disenroll, a blank page is shown. Another user will have to remove me from that course. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:06, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

  Done You have been removed. — xaosflux Talk 03:39, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Special:Notifications page failure

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T138424

The Special:Notifications page no longer displays notifications for me. I'm guessing there was a software update about two weeks ago and my system (Mac OS 10.4.11 Safari 4.0) does not support the upgrade. Is there a way to access the previous version of the software so that I won't have to rely on email notifications? Reidgreg (talk) 14:51, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

@Reidgreg: No, that is not possible. Could you try to be more exact as to what is not working ? Is the entire page just blank ? Anyways, you are already receiving a fallback interface (without any javascript enhancements), and apparently even the fallback interface is no longer working for you. Such a browser is HIGHLY HIGHLY deprecated and I would not expect it to work without major problems on most websites. MediaWiki only guarantees the most basic support for reading articles for such browsers, and they can (and are allowed to) break at any time. If you have a friend who has knowledge about HTML and CSS, he might be able to figure out why it would fail, and then we might be able to workaround it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:13, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
I filed a ticket, but it will probably be difficult to find the cause and not of the highest priority. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:23, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
The Special:Notifications page is displayed as a regular Wikipedia page with the top and left bars, the title is Notifications under which is a link to Preferences and under that is a short, wide rectangle with scrolling diagonal bars as if something is supposed to be there. I receive no error messages. Thanks for filing a ticket (I'd attempted to investigate this on Phabricator but couldn't get those pages to load, either). I know I'm in a small minority, but I always appreciated Wikipedia's accessibility and can't say I favour upgrades which disenfranchise even a small portion of the userbase. Reidgreg (talk) 17:07, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
@Reidgreg: To confirm, you're seeing something like this? https://phab.wmfusercontent.org/file/data/nae2e25sqczyxubnbqfl/PHID-FILE-x7jru4ipdobuttgt6onp/pasted_file That is the loading indicator, and if you're seeing it, that would mean that your browser is actually getting JavaScript, and fails in the middle of executing it. Can you try disabling JavaScript support in your browser and seeing if you can load the page then? We apparently still serve JavaScript to Safari 4 (and only blacklist Safari 3), maybe we should blacklist it too… Matma Rex talk 07:39, 24 June 2016 (UTC)
I don't believe I'm normally given to superlatives, but OMG it worked! Thank-you so much, I bow to your awesome technomagery! I'll just disable javascript to load that as a normal page when I get a notice of an alert waiting. (I wonder what changed that made it stop working -- I'd guess it had been trying the javascript but failed after a certain time and defaulted to the regular page, but for some reason it stopped defaulting?) Again, much thanks all around! - Reidgreg (talk) 10:12, 24 June 2016 (UTC)
At this point we don't really know. I guess either we accidentally started serving JavaScript code to Safari 4 when previously we did not, or some recent change to Notifications started requiring some feature of JavaScript that Safari 4 doesn't support. Hopefully we'll find out soon and this workaround will no longer be necessary :) Please watch the Phabricator task linked above for updates. Matma Rex talk 11:16, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Gallery tags: Make mode=packed the default

I think there are very few galleries still using the old grid-style, e.g. this one (content taken from Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Fungi):

We have a better solution, but it's not the default: adding mode=packed gives us:


When this was launched, it was suggested the default could be changed to mode=packed in future. I think it's time. Any disagreement? Adam Cuerden (talk) 11:42, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

I happen to agree, but this needs a {{RFC}} and some wider notifications. --Izno (talk) 12:11, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
True. Any objections to the above text being the RFC header? Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:16, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
Should be a neutral statement. Example: "Should galleries use mode=packed by default?", with the examples underneath. —  crh 23  (Talk) 14:20, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
Please don't hold WP:RFCs at VPT, this is a matter for WP:VPR. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:20, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
Just as a note, this is a trivial config change for us to make if asked. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:24, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

RFC started at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RFC: should galleries use mode=packed by default? —  crh 23  (Talk) 12:30, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

My team's hiring

mw:Technical Collaboration is hiring a Developer Advocate to work with volunteer developers. The job description and application process is on Greenhouse. A few points that may interest you:

  • You need basic coding skills. You don't actually have to be Catrope or Mooeypoo or someone like that, but you need to know more about coding than I do.
  • A four-year university degree is nice but not required.
  • Being active in technical work at Wikimedia projects is best, but equivalent work for other places is okay, too.
  • You'll probably get to attend every Hackathon and Wikimania every year (at WMF expense).
  • You can work from (nearly) anywhere in the world. At the moment, my team is "100% remote": there are no two people in the same city. Meetings are mostly at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time (currently 16:00 UTC) in an effort to accommodate the current range of timezones.
  • I'm not on the hiring committee, so you can feel free to ask me questions.  ;-)

Please share this information with your favorite volunteer devs and other tech people as soon as possible. They may start the first round of interviews soon. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

How much do you know about coding? Ruslik_Zero 11:52, 24 June 2016 (UTC)
Not much. (Does wikitext count as "coding"?  ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Interwiki link

Can someone look at this interwiki link to French version which is not linking although the article exists in French: Sir Charles Grandison, or, The happy man: a comedy in five acts

Cheers. Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 16:17, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

@Fountains-of-Paris: The {{lang}} template only marks a piece of text as being in a certain language; it doesn't automatically link anything to a different language Wikipedia. Because the title of the page you are linking to is in English, you actually don't need the {{lang}} template at all. To link to the French Wikipedia, you need to do something like this: [[:fr:Sir Charles Grandison, or, The happy man: a comedy in five acts]]. If you want to display just the English text, you need to pipe the link, like [[:fr:Sir Charles Grandison, or, The happy man: a comedy in five acts|Sir Charles Grandison, or, The happy man: a comedy in five acts]], or use the pipe trick. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 17:21, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
That worked on the first try. Cheers. Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 17:59, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Putting fr:Modèle:Bibliographie template code into Template:Bibliography produced unexpected results.

Hi, I am at Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario, so feel free to point me to a knowledgeable person who can handle this issue & also is attending.

I am excited about the possibility of using Wikidata for citations. fr:Modèle:Bibliographie does this, however, when I attempted Anglicizing the code & putting it into Template:Bibliography, I came up with disparate results. The French version produces formated citation data, whereas the English version produces an Infobox Bibliography

Here's the fr:Modèle:Bibliographie code:

<includeonly>{{#invoke:Wikidata/Références|citeItem}}</includeonly><noinclude>{{documentation}} [[Catégorie:Modèle utilisant les données de Wikidata]]</noinclude>

Here's the Template:Bibliography code:

<includeonly>{{#invoke:Wikidata/References|citeItem}}</includeonly><noinclude>{{documentation}}[[fr:Modèle:Bibliographie]][[Category:Templates using data from Wikidata]]</noinclude>

Help!

Peaceray (talk) 06:47, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

@Peaceray: The French Wikipedia has fr:Module:Wikidata/Références, whereas currently, the English Wikipedia does not have Module:Wikidata/References. (See Special:PrefixIndex/Module:Wikidata/. fr:Spécial:PrefixIndex/Module:Wikidata/ has quite a lot more. That would likely involve porting and translating the Lua code over to enwiki / English. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 06:58, 26 June 2016 (UTC) 07:03, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
Yes, frwiki Wikidata module's importing to some ther Wikipedia requires importing a lot of modules (if you're not a Lua expert). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:09, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
@Andy M. Wang: & @Edgars2007: thanks!
Anyone who works with modules & can help to import a French modules: see our comments above. We need to import a translated version of fr:Module:Wikidata/Références to Module:Wikidata/References. Alternately, if someone can act as a mentor & review my code, I could probably do it myself. I have done lots of coding, just not in Lua. Peaceray (talk) 07:41, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Parse error

A reader contacted Wikimedia (ticket:2016062410007891) identifying a parsing error in an article.

The article is celestial coordinate system.

The error is: 

Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\begin{bmatrix}\cos \delta \cos \alpha \\\cos \delta \sin \alpha \\\sin \delta \end{bmatrix}}={\begin{bmatrix}1&0&0\\0&\cos \varepsilon &-\sin \varepsilon \\0&\sin \varepsilon &\cos \varepsilon \end{bmatrix}}{\begin{bmatrix}\cos \beta \cos \lambda \\\cos \beta \sin \lambda \\\sin \beta \end{bmatrix}} .

and 

Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): \tan A={\sin h \over \cos h\sin \phi _{o}-\tan \delta \cos \phi _{o}}\qquad \qquad {\begin{cases}\cos a\sin A=\cos \delta \sin h\\\cos a\cos A=\cos \delta \cos h\sin \phi _{o}-\sin \delta \cos \phi _{o}\end{cases}}

The reader reported seeing the error in:

  • Desktop Google Chrome
  • Desktop Mozilla FireFox
  • Desktop Internet Explore
  • Mobile Internet Explorer

I tried to reproduce, and do not see the error in

  • Desktop Google Chrome
  • Desktop Google Chrome (Mobile view)

But I do see it in:

  • Mobile Android using Wikipedia app

I know the have been some issues with LaTeX, is this one known?--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:42, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

These a remnants from the switchover to the new math renderer a couple weeks ago. Purging the pages should fix it. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 16:33, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. The person reporting is now seeing it fine - sorry, I should have considered suggesting a purge.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:03, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Editnotices and moves

Some notes and questions:

  1. My current belief is that if page "Foo" moves to "Bar", "Template:Editnotices/Page/Foo" should move to "Template:Editnotices/Page/Bar", preferably without a redirect left behind. This is because when "Template:Editnotices/Page/Foo" is a redirect editnotice left over, editing "Foo" the redirect page still uses "Bar's" editnotice, which seems unnecessary.
    • Based on a double-redirected editnotice test I did a few days ago, I conjecture that if "Template:Editnotices/Page/A" is a quintuple-redirect to "Template:Editnotices/Page/E", then page "A" uses "E"'s editnotice.
  2. If the target page for an editnotice does not exist, I've been assuming that WP:G8 applies to it, despite the policy not exactly spelling it out. It might make sense to elaborate on the policy.
  3. Because an editnotice on top of a redirect seems quite unnecessary, I've occasionally used suppressredirect and invoked WP:G8 (or G6?), especially if the target page has little chance of moving back to the original target page. This sounds reasonble, right?
  4. Is it technically possible to have the move dialog include a check box to move a page/group/protection editnotice, if such notices exist? Or does this simply have to be done separately without any prompt of existing editnotices? How much time, or how difficult would this addition be for the devs?

Thanks, and appreciate any feedback. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 06:10, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

To answer the last question. I don't think it will be included in Mediawiki software (editnotices system can change, different system in various Wikipedias etc.). What can be done - create some kind of Twinkle-like gadget for moving pages or create some JS script, that simply adds such checkbox at Special:Movepage. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 06:01, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-26

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

Recent changes

  • The ORES service has now moved to a new location. This should make it easier to use ORES. The ORES review service is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata and Persian Wikipedia. ORES is an artificial intelligence system for Wikimedia wikis to help editors. [36]
  • The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed. [37]
  • A new category for tracking pages with math errors was added: Category:Pages with math errors. [38]

Problems

Changes this week

  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
  • The way to mark notifications as read or unread will be changed to be more clear. [41]

Meetings

  •   You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation will look at developing better tools for edit review. This is because research suggests we scare away newcomers who want to help. [42]
  • An e-mail from the Editing Department explains the technical work that is planned and being researched for the future. Items include better wikitext and visual editing, prompts for edits, language improvements, annotations, and meta-data separation. [43]
  • The sorting of Notifications into the two fly-out menus is going to change on July 5 to 7. Bundled notifications should be easier to explore and mark as read individually. [44][45][46]
  •   From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected. [47]
  • Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will have Wikidata descriptions added to articles in the mobile view by default. This is currently a beta option for the mobile versions. This might come to other wikis later. [48]

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

15:42, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

"Your edit was saved"/"The page has been created" message not appearing

I have no idea why, but I just made a number of successive edits and the "Your edit was saved" message does not appear. What happened? In some of these edits, I used the "cite" function which at first I thought was the reason, but I then edited another page without using the cite function, and the message does not appear. For reference, I'm using the latest version of Google Chrome on a Windows 8 laptop. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 07:18, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

In a touch of irony, the "your message was saved" notice appeared when I created this section, although my original concern stands. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 07:19, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
  • Are you using any User scripts or Gadgets? If so, disable them and see if the error persists. If so, open your browser's developer tools by pressing Ctrl+⇧ Shift+j, and leave it open whilst editing; when the error occurs, look in the developer console to see if any RED messages appear and report them here. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 09:20, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

False positive reversion

Sometimes, I get a ping notification that an edit has been reverted, although it hasn't been reverted. See for example Special:Diff/727326093. I had previously commented out a non-free image, and then Dan56 responded by inserting a different image on the page. The user's modification to the page was clearly not a reversion of my edit, and the edit summary doesn't suggest so either. Why was I informed that my edit had been reverted here? --Stefan2 (talk) 11:39, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

The notification is triggered by use of the undo or rollback link. With the undo link the user can change the edit and automatic edit summary before saving. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:45, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
Oh, so I suppose that the user used the undo button and then made extra changes before clicking on "save", then. Thanks, that explains why I got a notification for that edit. --Stefan2 (talk) 12:04, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Mobile-specific link?

We've been having problems at the Refdesk (see [49]) that links from Inputbox were getting truncated for mobile users causing sections to be posted at the top instead of the bottom. There's a request out to fix the bug, but meanwhile at Wikipedia:Reference desk/header/howtoask I just used the plain link to start a section, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=&editintro=&preloadtitle=&section=new&title=Wikipedia%3AReference+desk%2Fheader%2Fhowtoask&create=Ready%3F+Ask+a+new+question! However, there's a wrinkle, namely that this plain link as written doesn't know if the user is a mobile user or not. (Even so, it is better than having mobile users' new questions get stuck at the wrong spot in a very long page and have to be moved) Is there something I can link to that will redirect for mobile and non-mobile users differently, or some way to have two different links and hide one from the mobile and one from the non-mobile users, or something? Wnt (talk) 00:57, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

It seems to be we still have a bigger problem namely AFAIK none of us actually know how to start a new section on a non talk page on the mobile site. Nil Einne (talk) 13:50, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
Actually I'm now even more sure there's probably no solution at this time. While it's possible to add new sections to talk pages from the mobile site, this currently only works for logged in users. So even if there were some way to get it working for non talk pages, it's going to be of limited utility. It's possible there's someway that will work for all editors, but I suspect no. Nil Einne (talk) 14:30, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Good Article count

Hi I was wondering if somebody could find how many female biographies we have as a GA vs male biographies? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:59, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Counting only those, which are marked as "human" and female/male at Wikidata: male: 3711, female: 701. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 06:08, 27 June 2016 (UTC)
Good question Dr. Blofeld. Although Wikidata had no attribute for article class (GA, good article), neither has Wikipedia created a subcategory for gender at Category:GA-Class biography articles; otherwise Search could have counted them using its incategory parameter. See {{WikiProject Biography}} about creating such a category. — Cpiral§Cpiral 20:32, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Thankyou Edgars2007 and Cpiral. Regards.♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:50, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Pinged without new signature

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T137755

I got a notification that Drbogdan‬ mentioned me in [50]. wikEdDiff (the green triangle in [51]]) shows the edit only added {{-}}, added newlines and changed indentation. There was no new signature but two old signed posts by Drbogdan were interpreted as new lines by the MediaWiki diff. Is this supposed to make a notification possible? Wikipedia:Notifications#Triggering events says: "if the mention is not on a completely new line with a new signature, no notification will be sent". mw:Manual:Echo#Technical details doesn't explicitly say the signature has to be new but I always thought it had to. It does say: "In order for the signature to be recognised, the post must contain the exact same markup that writing ~~~ (and ~~~~) generates." Does the software simply test whether the diff looks like a signed post but ignore whether the timestamp is many hours old and no tildes were used? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:33, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I also have had such notifications, so it's not a one-time bug. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:34, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Me too, for the same edits. See phab:T137755 and WT:Echo#Retriggered notification for mention. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:28, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Looking at my old notifications, I was also notified in your own example [52]. It seems my guess was right: The software ignores the age of the signature when it decides whether to notify. If you edit old posts in a section where you already pinged somebody then you risk repeating the ping if the diff thinks you are adding the line it's in. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:21, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Help requested to create a Visual Editor compatible template for importing open license text to Wikipedia

Hi all

I've been working on a process to make it easy for people to import open license text into Wikipedia, currently there are no clear instructions or clear mechanism for adding openly licensed text to Wikipedia articles. I have worked on improving a template to add openly licensed text, however the process is still fiddly and time consuming. There are a huge number of open license sources compatible with Wikipedia including:

  • Around 9000 open license journals.
  • Galleries, libraries, archives and museums who produce text under an open license.
  • Government text that is available under an open license.

So far I have written simple guidelines, planned out what the template should include and started a plan for a VE toolbar tool to make it even easier in the future, however I simply don't understand templates enough to add new fields to the template that show up in VE, I think it has something to do with VE not being able to do nested templates?

Please could someone add the following fields to Template:Open-source attribution (that will appear when you use VE?

  • Title
  • Author
  • Publisher
  • URL
  • License statement URL

Many thanks

John Cummings (talk) 09:12, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

How To Do - Multiple Templates?

IF Possible - is there a better way of adding templates together? - one of my preliminary attempts is presented below - Thanks in advance for any help with this - in any case - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 19:36, 28 June 2016 (UTC) 

{{multiple image
 | width             = 300
 | image1            = {{Human timeline}}
 | image2            = {{Life timeline}}
 | image3            = {{Nature timeline}}
}}
Output
[[file:|300px|alt=]]
[[file:|300px|alt=]]
[[file:|300px|alt=]]
The {{multiple image}} template, as its name suggests, is for multiple images, not multiple templates. Why not make a one-row three-column table instead? --Redrose64 (talk) 19:58, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thank you for your comments - and suggestion - yes - agreed - the table idea seems to be a worthy consideration - Thanks again - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 20:31, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Code for the simplest table: 

{|
|-
| {{Human timeline}}
| {{Life timeline}}
| {{Nature timeline}}
|}
Click show to see result

See more at Help:Table. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:09, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter and Redrose64: Thank you for the basic Table code - seems to have omitted some of the wikilinks in the templates - see => User:Drbogdan/sandbox-timelines#Multiple template tests - may have to play further with the table idea (at Help:Table) to see if I can make it work better - in any case - Thanks again - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 21:23, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
BRIEF Followup - seems the wikilinks in the templates (using the basic table code) are omitted and/or substantially misaligned on my Dell Windows xp desktop computer, but are *entirely* OK on my HP Windows xp laptop pc, as well as my Android tablet, for some reason - may be a video graphics problem on the Dell pc - may study this more at my next opportunity - Thanks again for all the comments - they're all *greatly* appreciated - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 01:04, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
If you want the templates to line up at the top, then you can add the CSS code for vertical alignment to each cell. The code is documented at Help:Table#Vertical alignment in cells. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:10, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

WikiEd character sets are gone

I searched the archives here but couldn't find an answer. The character sets are missing in my WikiEd editing window. I checked by preferences and they haven't changed. There was a link to this message board if I was having problems-so here I am. Why don't the character sets and the 'short cut' code appear in my WikiEd edit window. Thank you ahead of time for your answer. I am not very techy so I probably need a plain English answer with no acronyms. What is really weird is that I can see the character sets here on the message board below the editing windows but I don't see them on article editing windows. I am confused, obviously. Best Regards, — Preceding unsigned comment added by Barbara (WVS) (talk • contribs) 10:11, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Please describe exactly where you see what you refer to as "WikiEd character sets" and "short cut code". What is your browser and what is your skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? PrimeHunter (talk) 10:30, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
Barbara, are you using WP:WikEd ("a full-featured integrated text editor for Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome" that you have to manually enable in the gadgets' tab of your preferences) or the regular wikitext editor? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:13, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Admin dashboard

The admin dashboard is no longer transcluding correctly. I went to the page where I kept it transcluded, but now I just see a link. The same applies when viewing other pages on which the template was formerly transcluded. Is it just me, or do others see it as well? Biblio (talk) WikiProject Reforming Wikipedia. 00:35, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

@Biblioworm: It's currently in category:Pages where template include size is exceeded. See the related discussion at Template talk:Admin dashboard#Page Overflow - NQ (talk) 00:50, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Missing email

I got a notification of getting a Wiki-email (this is the first time I saw this notification), but I have not received any email. I checked all mails, spam etc. Has anyone else faced this? --Tito Dutta (talk) 08:18, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia to the Moon: invitation to edit

Three weeks ago, you were invited to vote on how to take Wikipedia articles to the Moon. Community voting is over and the winning idea is to send all ‘’featured articles and lists’’ to the Moon. This decision means that, starting today, Wikipedians from all language communities are warmly invited to intensively work on their best articles and lists, and submit them to Wikipedia to the Moon. The central site to coordinate between communities will be Meta-Wiki. You will find an overview and more information there. Hopefully, we will be able to represent as many languages as possible, to show Wikipedia’s diversity. Please feel kindly invited to edit on behalf of your community and tell us about your work on featured content!

Best, Moon team at Wikimedia Deutschland 14:10, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Editing News #2—2016

Editing News #2—2016 Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

 
Did you know?

It's quick and easy to insert a references list.

 

Place the cursor where you want to display the references list (usually at the bottom of the page). Open the "Insert" menu and click the "References list" icon (three books).

If you are using several groups of references, which is relatively rare, you will have the opportunity to specify the group. If you do that, then only the references that belong to the specified group will be displayed in this list of references.

Finally, click "Insert" in the dialog to insert the References list. This list will change as you add more footnotes to the page.

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

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Arabic and Indic scripts, and adapting the visual editor to the needs of the Wikivoyages and Wikisources.

Recent changes

The visual editor is now available to all users at most Wikivoyages. It was also enabled for all contributors at the French Wikinews.

The single edit tab feature combines the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. It has been deployed to several Wikipedias, including Hungarian, Polish, English and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as to all Wikivoyages. At these wikis, you can change your settings for this feature in the "Editing" tab of Special:Preferences. The team is now reviewing the feedback and considering ways to improve the design before rolling it out to more people.

Future changes

The "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including: Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Assamese, Aramaic and others.

The team is working with the volunteer developers who power Wikisource to provide the visual editor there, for opt-in testing right now and eventually for all users. (T138966)

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. It will look like the visual editor, and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices around September 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

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

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 21:09, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): I think you meant to say that the save page button would say "Publish". Graham87 04:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, Graham. Actually, what you heard is a link to MediaWiki:Publishpage. It appears that an admin has boldly changed the meaning of the label, to make it be the same as the existing one. This is bad practice for internationalization (when you want to change the meaning on a page, you should change the label itself, not just the contents) and perpetuates the known problem with this being confusing to newbies, who aren't sure whether "Save" creates a private copy or publishes their information on the web forever. We should probably have a discussion about this at some point. (Right now, it doesn't matter, because the label isn't being used.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:59, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
For previous discussion, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 146#Tech News: 2016-17 and phab:T131132. It can't be said that there was demonstrated a balance of support for this change locally. BethNaught (talk) 17:27, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
I've started a section (#Save_Page_vs_Publish_Page_-_revisited_July_2016) below to try to get better community input for how the English Wikipedia community would like to present this to our editors. — xaosflux Talk 02:46, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

DISPLAYTITLE question

Can someone explain why DISPLAYTITLE isn't working on Collins-class submarine replacement project? I think I'm doing everything correctly. Jenks24 (talk) 18:47, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

@Jenks24: {{Infobox ship begin}}, further down the article, was also trying to set the display title. I've added "display title = none" to stop that happening. -- John of Reading (talk) 19:01, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks John. I should have noticed that myself. Jenks24 (talk) 19:03, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
(EC) It appears to have a conflict with another displaytitle, probably generated by a template. It is listed on Category:Pages with DISPLAYTITLE conflicts. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 19:03, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Revision history page tool apps do not appear to be working

"External tools: Revision history statistics." This app does not appear to be working on multiple pages from the edit history page. You click the tab and the link appears to go into indefinite background processing with no response after extended minutes of waiting. This appears to happen on multiple pages such as Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Jane Austen, etc. Is the app down for maintainance? Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 18:26, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I am finding the same with many pages also, such as Sample mean. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.231.53.238 (talk) 01:18, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

502 bad gateway

When using Google Chrome, version 50.0.2661.86, I visited Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome/Tasks#General Backlog and clicked on the link for Start-class, High-importance Classical Greece and Rome articles (this link: https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&projecta=Classical_Greece_and_Rome&importance=High-Class&quality=Start-Class), which produced a "502 Bad Gateway" page. This has been happening for a few days now. Chickadee46 (talk|contribs) (WP:MCW) 22:26, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

@Hedonil, Kelson, Theopolisme, and Wolfgang42: Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 00:59, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
The webservice died for an unknown reason. I have restarted it. It should be back online. 212.51.141.191 (talk) 07:30, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

History of category population

I noticed that in Related changes, one can see the recent list of additions and removals of pages into/from a category; is there a similar feature for the history of an individual category? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 09:34, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

If a category page is on your watchlist and "Hide categorization of pages" is disabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist then page additions and removals for the category is shown on the watchlist (Help:Watchlist needs updating about this). The watchlist also has a "page categorization" box to toggle the display. If the watched category is hidden then "Show hidden categories" must be enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. The watchlist can only go back up to 30 days. To avoid numerous other entries on the watchlist you may want to select Category in the Namespace field, or use an alternate account that only watches the category. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:53, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Definition lists

Definition lists are described at MOS:DEFLIST, with the markup of ; name : value. Since before I joined, the colour of the "term" header in these lists was bold and black, but recently, it was changed to #777 (I know not after what discussion). This does not conform with WP:COLOR, as #777 on the white background is not WCAG AA Compliant, let alone WCAG AAA Compliant (per [53]). This means that readers with accessibility issues may have trouble reading the headers. Where do I either request that this be either changed back to black, or to #585858 at the very least to make it compliant again (per [54])? Alex|The|Whovian? 13:15, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

It is appearing as #252525 for me, which is fine
Example list:
name 1
value 1
name 2
value 2
name 3
value 3
—  crh 23  (Talk) 13:36, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
I'm not seeing this either? Is it only appearing with certain skins? Can you provide an example? (An annotated screen shot may help too). — xaosflux Talk 13:40, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Interesting... I've never changed my skin (to be honest, I don't actually know how). A screenshot: [55] So for me, the above list and the list below appear the same.
name 1
value 1
name 2
value 2
name 3
value 3
Alex|The|Whovian? 13:51, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Looks like you may have an extension playing up - try disabling them one-by-one until it goes away. —  crh 23  (Talk) 13:52, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
You can also try logging out to test whether it's something in your account, and try clearing your entire cache. If you still see grey instead of black then name your browser. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:02, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
the "injected stylesheet" in your screenshot implies that this is caused by a browser extension. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:05, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the help, all. Turns out, it was an extension, as the lists appeared correctly while in Incognito, and also after I deactivated one that I haven't used in months. Again, thanks. Alex|The|Whovian? 14:11, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Out of interest, which extension was it? —  crh 23  (Talk) 14:12, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Facebook Chat Downloader [56]. Alex|The|Whovian? 14:13, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Edit replication to dewiki?

I found an edit on dewiki under my username that I did not make. It appears to be replicated from an edit that I made on enwiki. How do I know that I didn't make the dewiki edit? I don't have HotCat enabled on dewiki. It is highly unlikely that I would add enwiki categories to dewiki.

enwiki edit: Emily Batty
dewiki edit: Emily Batty

So what is up with that? --Bamyers99 (talk) 19:52, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

@Bamyers99: The page was imported from the English Wikipedia; see the page history. Sam Walton (talk) 19:58, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
See more about the feature at Help:Import. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:07, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
I don't like the feature at all: m:Help_talk:Import#Importing_pages_should_be_disabled_or_improved. Stryn (talk) 22:09, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
When there is an article on one language Wikipedia that another language Wikipedia wants to use, the Import feature can be used to ensure that all of the attribution is maintained. This is normally used if an article is translated between languages, as the translator didn't really author the "content" so much as the "presentation". Due to single user login all userids on WMF wikis are linked, that is why it is still associated with your "account" not just your "userid". Do you have any suggestions for what could be better? — xaosflux Talk 22:29, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
@Bamyers99: You only have one? My "real" edits on German Wikipedia total no more than eleven or twelve, but I've got hundreds credited to me, over 500 of which were imported. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:09, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
"Normally"? I don't think that's standard practice everywhere, maybe on dewiki it is. On huwiki, we just use a template on the article, that's sufficient attribution. It doesn't really make much sense to import all those foreign-language revisions and then see them overwritten by the local language version. nyuszika7h (talk) 15:56, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Linking issue in image metadata again

I have posted here about a similar issue before, but I forgot the interface page that is responsible for displaying the image metadata, so here I am again. On File:Tiniposter.jpg, the software is shown as "GIMP 2.8.16", a redlink – that should point to just GIMP. nyuszika7h (talk) 21:26, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

uselang=qqx shows there are different interface messages for each metadata field. The software link is made with MediaWiki:Exif-software-value which currently just says [[$1]] to link the value. It should be possible to check for an apparent version number and remove it with a piped link if it would give a red link, or change the link completely if it needs disambiguation. Do we want to use resources on that? commons:MediaWiki:Exif-software-value does the same as us, except it says [[w:$1|$1]] to make an interwiki link to the English Wikipedia. MediaWiki:Exif-make-value is more advanced. It's used in a "Camera manufacturer" field and has a switch to correct the link in many cases. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:54, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
You beat me to it :P. Is this a common metadata value (i.e. program and version number)? If not, a redirect could suffice. If so, no super easy solution springs to mind. That said, it could be possible to implement a proper fix in MediaWiki itself: looking at the relevant source code, I think the software name and the version could be treated separately. Bit of a bother though. —  crh 23  (Talk) 22:06, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
The default MediaWiki message makes no link but just displays the value. It's only an issue here because we customize the message to make a link. I don't know Exif metadata standards but if it's one field in the file then I doubt the MediaWiki developers want to split it. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:24, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
I think that phab:T57977 is closely related to this. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:02, 30 June 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, I had thought that it was passing the software and the version as one string where it could be two, but it seems from below that it does use two values. —  crh 23  (Talk) 08:32, 30 June 2016 (UTC)
MediaWiki does use a different message when the software metadata is an array: MediaWiki:exif-software-version-value. That can be customized to link only the name of the software. But that message isn't used in this case, because the metadata in question doesn't use the version array. Reach Out to the Truth 00:29, 30 June 2016 (UTC)
So is this a case of the metadata being formatted incorrectly? —  crh 23  (Talk) 08:32, 30 June 2016 (UTC) Looks like there may not be a proper way to do it [57]. —  crh 23  (Talk) 08:36, 30 June 2016 (UTC)
You just have to create a redirect. That's why we have a special template ({{R from EXIF}}) and category Category:Redirects from file metadata links for EXIF-specific redirects. — This, that and the other (talk) 11:45, 30 June 2016 (UTC)
Thought as much. So are we going to have a redirect for every single version of every program that adds EXIF data? —  crh 23  (Talk) 17:25, 30 June 2016 (UTC)
We pretty much do already... — This, that and the other (talk) 02:50, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
Been hunting through the wrong archives to find where I was previously involved in an EXIF problem - it's at File talk:Torre dei Becci, June 2013.jpg. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:05, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-27

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

Recent changes

  • A daily email summary of notifications could be sent even when there were no notifications from the wiki. Now no email will be sent if there is no activity. [58]

Changes this week

  • The "⧼citoid-citefromidtool-title⧽" button in the visual editor's toolbar will move into the "Insert" menu except for Wikipedias, Wikibookses and Wikiversities. This is to make it less prominent on wikis that don't use it as much. [59]
  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can take part in the next office hour for Wikidata on IRC on July 8 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

MassMessage not working for MassMessageList content model targets

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T139303
Resolved

We appear to be having a problem using Special:MassMessage for lists that are in the MassMessageList content model. I have opened phab:T139303 to investigate. Mass-messages sent to lists in wikitext appear to be working still. — xaosflux Talk 16:59, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: I need to send Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Subscribe ASAP, any ideas? Kharkiv07 (T) 18:23, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
I'll make you a wikitext copy of the current list, hold on a moment. BethNaught (talk) 18:26, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
@Kharkiv07: Can you send it from this? BethNaught (talk) 18:33, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
@BethNaught: No... could you try changing the content model of the original page to Wikitext... would that work? Kharkiv07 (T) 18:36, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Might work, but I don't want to irreversibly break anything. What are the particular requirements of a Wikitext delivery list? BethNaught (talk) 18:37, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Try to change User:Kharkiv07/MM to wikitext please, that shouldn't break anything. A normal formatted list just uses #invoke:Mailing list member, or Template:Mailing list member. Kharkiv07 (T) 18:43, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Note, that won't have the affect you want - it will make it in a weird style. — xaosflux Talk 18:50, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Note: it looks like the bug has been identified and the devs are working on it for go-forward. — xaosflux Talk 18:44, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Thanks much to both of you! Kharkiv07 (T) 18:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
  Resolved
 – Fixed by phab:T139303
  • Note: This issue has been resolved and tested. — xaosflux Talk 20:07, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Email Problem

Hello. I raised an issue like this some 1-2 years ago but I don't remember the exact time. The fact is when I send an email with "Email this user" feature or more specifically with Special:EmailUser/**..**, users state that they haven't received any email from me. So I tried checking the Email me a copy of my message., and yes, No email is sent to me and at the same time users also say that they too haven't received any email. I tested the problem with two of my email addresses. Both results are negative. For information the one I mainly use is a **...**@yahoo.com id and the one I tested with is a **...**@live.com id.
I haven't received any email at my live.com id when I checked Email me a copy of my message. and sent the email. But I don't know whether the user received it or not.
So now can anyone please tell me why this problem is happening? --Pratyya (Hello!) 13:37, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

@Pratyya Ghosh: The problem is Yahoo, they don't like us sending emails as if they were from (somebody)@yahoo.com - so they don't get delivered. If you check through the archives of this page, it's come up many times. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:19, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
Many ISPs are worried about emails sent by someone other than the claimed sender - and one major red flag is the mail having been sent from some domain other than the one which the address claims to be from. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 09:25, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
So the problem is Yahoo?! Now let me tell you one thing. Email me a copy of my message. doesn't apply for either Yahoo or live.com. But it works for Gmail. Moreover I tested with 3 email addresses. Only yahoo didn't work and live.com partially worked. Oh! for the information I used this account of mine for testing. --Pratyya (Hello!) 15:24, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes, in brief - your email provider is refusing to accept the message. From their defense - they are trying to protect their users from spam and phishing emails. — xaosflux Talk 21:11, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

"Refreshing"

I hope this is the correct place.

For about the past two days, I've been having minor issues with the site. I'll be reading a discussion on a talk page or viewing my watch list, for example, and the page will just go blank and basically refresh itself, going back to the top. It's random and isn't too often. I don't think it's the technical definition of a refresh since I don't think I've seen the refresh spin icon in the browser tab, but it's basically the same thing and makes me lose my place. It hasn't happened yet, thankfully, but if it ever happens while I'm writing a message, if my message isn't lost, then it's not really refreshing, but just going back to the top. Still an issue, though.

Wikipedia is the only site this is happening on. No other other are having this issue. I'm also using Chrome, if that's of any help. Amaury (talk) 21:11, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Is anyone able to provide some feedback on this? If I've posted this in the wrong section, please point me to the right section. Thanks. Amaury (talk | contribs) 02:24, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
This is the right page. I suspect that the lack of response is because no one else is experiencing this, or has any suggestions as to how to go about diagnosing it. I've never seen anything like what you describe, at Wikipedia or anywhere else. I've always been on Windows, and mostly using Firefox, with some Chrome, Opera, and IE in my past. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:30, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Thank you. I'll continue waiting. Perhaps someone else has experienced it before. As it only happens on Wikipedia and it's not that often, anyway, it's really no big deal. Just curious as to what it would be as it only started a few days ago. Amaury (talk | contribs) 02:34, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

CSS support for tableless layouts

Several CSS rules in MediaWiki:Common.css require the use of <table> elements for layout, even if <table> is semantically incorrect. For example, Template:Sister project links is not tabular content, and would be simple to switch to a tableless layout, but not for Common.css's "body.mediawiki table.mbox-small" selector requiring use of <table>. Changing selectors from "table.class" to simply ".class" would allow the use of any element, such as <div class="class">, for tableless layouts, while <table class="class"> would still work as well. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 07:07, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

You're generally right. But some rules need to match those specified in the software itself. Removing the element from those rules would cause them to fail because the specificity doesn't match. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:53, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
Doh, I forgot about the cascade. I don't think I'm up to testing every message box on Wikipedia! I'll start testing a smaller change (something like diff) that hopefully only affects .mbox-small, and leave the other tables alone until div replacements are ready? Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 01:57, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Per Edokter. That said, those tables which are being used as presentation should have |role=presentation set on them. I think we should look into converting some of the more simple tables to usually more correct divs. --Izno (talk) 18:07, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
As long as they play nice. Some boxes, notably ambox family message boxes, use tables to prevent unruly formatting when used next to floating content. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 20:59, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
We are starting to reach a point in browser support however, where we might no longer be stuck with tables. IE8 and later support display:table, so we might consider making older IE versions less nice, in favor of more correct usage of elements. I see no direct need to do so, but it's something to consider I guess. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:58, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Okay, proposing a bare minimum change: Old revision of MediaWiki:Common.css to Old revision of User:Matt Fitzpatrick/common.css (diff), with tweaks to fix problems that came up in testing.

  • replaces the .mbox-small selector's "table" with "html"; same specificity to stay in the same order in the cascade
  • adds "overflow:hidden" to the non-floating version; giving it a block formatting context (aka hasLayout) like a table makes it interact with floats the same as a table
  • adds "box-sizing:border-box" to both versions; matches the table model, which includes padding inside width

This only affects .mbox-small(-left), but if it works out, similar changes for the whole .ambox family might become feasible down the road. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 08:44, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

New Main Page Gadget is broken...

... and apparently User:Fram has moved the page without a redirect. I messaged him/her about this, but still posting here in case that it was a differently story althogether. - gacelisnothing (Problems?) 07:23, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

If this was about the discussion in the WP:CENT box, I have now corrected that link. If anything else needs to be done, just let me know! Fram (talk) 07:26, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
@Fram: No, I think what he means is that if you use the Gadget, that you get directed to the wrong place, because you moved the page, without updating the Gadget. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:59, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
I have changed it to link to the actual Main Page for now, as the link was not to some general proposed new talk page but one man's pet project which has been generally opposed anyway. Ideally, the gadget should be rewritten to be flexible: if no proposed Main Page exists, show the real one. Fram (talk) 08:10, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
And now I have also changed it at the right place, I guess. I first only edited the description, not the actual link. Does it work now? Fram (talk) 08:21, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Any help welcome. I have now corrected it so that people using this gadget get to see the Main Page, but it seems that it causes an endless loop (always reloading the Main Page, because everytime the page is loaded, the gadget kicks in). Perhaps the gadget simply needs to be removed from the preferences, but that's why we have Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/MediaWiki:Gadget-NewMainPage. Fram (talk) 08:28, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I think that was a perfect demonstration of why admins without JS experience should not be allowed to change scripts... Thanks for that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:34, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Seconded. —David Levy 08:36, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Did it occur to you to maybe not break/disable the gadget upfront? Irrespective of whether it should have been added in the first place, this disruption benefits no one. —David Levy 08:36, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
I moved a page from the Draft space to the User space. There was no indication whatsoever that this Draft page was used in a gadget (which was a pretty stupid thing to do in any case, IMO). Only after someone complained (correctly) on my talk page that the "Gadget box" was broken did I try to fix it, and nominated the Mediawiki page for deletion. A small number of people have been affected by this for a short time, big deal... Any autoconfirmed editor could have vandalized that Draft page and ruined the Main Page for the users using this gadget in much, much worse ways, as this was not protected beyond autoconfirmed. I don't think my edits were the main problem here. Fram (talk) 08:43, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
You didn't "try to fix it"; you intentionally disabled it. Why not point it to the page's new location for the time being (pending the MfD discussion's outcome)? Who, in your view, benefits from the current setup? The users who opted in, whose preference has been overridden? The users who see a confusing gadget that presently serves no purpose?
Almost all of Wikipedia is subject to possible vandalism. A draft page viewed by "a small number of people" isn't a particularly appealing target. Users are far more likely to encounter such issues upon clicking through to the day's featured article. —David Levy 08:59, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
In what way didn't I try to fix it? The problem was that people using the gadget no longer saw any version of the main page and instead they got a redlink. I fixed it, they now have a main page. That this is the standard Main Page and not the one-man-version in user space is a choice, and you may disagree with it, but there's no need to claim that I disabled anything or that I didn't try to fix anything. Who benefits from it? Everyone? They are no longer pointed towards a one-man-proposal instead of a general new proposal, as was the original intention. The purpose and benefit of the gadget was next to zero for a long time already, it pointed first to a long-rejected 2015 proposal, and then to a soon-to-be-rejected one-man-proposal. People had the choice between the real Main Page or whatever page anyone had last put at the gadget location, ignoring the fact that the current draft proposer changed the location target of the gadget to his preferred one. People did not have the choice between proposals and couldn't e.g. stick with the previous one. Your objections seem to be more based on philospohical grounds and not on anything practical. Fram (talk) 09:20, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
@Fram: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that the net result is that the new main page gadget (which I don't use) no longer points to the new main page, but rather to the current one? As an outsider, it appears that you have effectively disabled the gadget (by nullifying its functionality) without first getting consensus (at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/MediaWiki:Gadget-NewMainPage or elsewhere), whatever your reasoning. Since this has proven controversial, I'd advise you to restore the status quo until the dispute is resolved. —  crh 23  (Talk) 09:54, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
As your comments at Draft talk:Main Page show that you know very little about this (even describing a 2013 main page proposal as WP:POINTY or a move to user space as "locking down", I don't really care much about your comments about consensus and the like. I haev not nullified any fucntionality, I have removed Edokter's unilateral self-promotion (as it doesn't look like he had any consensus to remove the previous target of the gadget and replace it with his preferred version in the first place, if you want to play that game). So you can advise anything you want, but I see no reason to give such advice any weight. Fram (talk) 10:03, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
I have made no comments at Draft talk:Main Page and I have not participate in any discussion in any way related to this before, I just came across this discussion and wanted to provide my perspective as an outsider. Of course you are not obliged to follow it, but controversial changes should be discussed before being made. Have a read of WP:BRD and the like. —  crh 23  (Talk) 10:16, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
My apologies, for some reason I confused you with user:CFCF. Please ignore my comments. Fram (talk) 11:46, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
I haev not nullified any fucntionality, I have removed Edokter's unilateral self-promotion (as it doesn't look like he had any consensus to remove the previous target of the gadget and replace it with his preferred version in the first place, if you want to play that game).
Where are you getting the idea that the gadget previously pointed to a different draft? —David Levy 10:28, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
In what way didn't I try to fix it?
The gadget's purpose was to replace the default main page with the draft version for those who opted in. Did you attempt to restore this function?
The problem was that people using the gadget no longer saw any version of the main page and instead they got a redlink.
They got a broken page, actually.
I fixed it, they now have a main page.
Yes, they have the one that they opted out of viewing. This, in your view, "fixes" the gadget?
That this is the standard Main Page and not the one-man-version in user space is a choice, and you may disagree with it,
Actually, I'm inclined to agree that Edokter's draft shouldn't have its own gadget. That doesn't mean that its removal was urgent. (Why even bother with the MfD listing?) It's existed for nearly a year without causing anything approaching the level of disruption that you just triggered.
but there's no need to claim that I disabled anything or that I didn't try to fix anything.
In what respect did you not disable the gadget? You removed its code (leaving behind a nonfunctional checkbox).
Who benefits from it? Everyone? They are no longer pointed towards a one-man-proposal instead of a general new proposal, as was the original intention. The purpose and benefit of the gadget was next to zero for a long time already, it pointed first to a long-rejected 2015 proposal, and then to a soon-to-be-rejected one-man-proposal.
The gadget was based on Edokter's draft from day one. This is the first revision to which it pointed.
People had the choice between the real Main Page or whatever page anyone had last put at the gadget location, ignoring the fact that the current draft proposer changed the location target of the gadget to his preferred one.
Huh? Edokter created the gadget. He changed its target (twice) when his draft was moved to a different title.
Your objections seem to be more based on philospohical grounds and not on anything practical.
On the contrary, I object to your actions on the basis of pragmatism. —David Levy 10:28, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
The history of the pages are quite convoluted, and I think I got confused with some of his actions: he moved on 14 April Wikipedia talk:Main Page (2015 redesign) to Wikipedia talk:Main Page (2016 redesign), which he had previously (in January) deleted; and the same day he moved Draft:Main Page to Wikipedia:2015 main page redesign proposal/draft/TakuyaMurata. The result is that both the current and the previous target name of the gadget have history (alternatives to the main page design) deleted/moved by Edokter (one as housekeeping, one as "name too generic"), and that he afterwards used both names to place his version on. When I look at it again, it does seem that you are correct and that the gadget at all times pointed to his page, but that he simple moved everything aside to get his page at his preferred location multiple times. Fram (talk) 11:55, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Open call for Project Grants

 

Greetings! The Project Grants program is accepting proposals from July 1st to August 2nd to fund new tools, research, offline outreach (including editathon series, workshops, etc), online organizing (including contests), and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Whether you need a small or large amount of funds, Project Grants can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.

Also accepting candidates to join the Project Grants Committee through July 15.

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 15:21, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

How should search handle question marks?

The Wikimedia Foundation search team recently discovered that search queries that end with a question mark (i.e “How old is Tom Cruise?”) can some times lead to zero results being shown. This ‘zero result rate’ is one of the primary ways we determine how people are satisfied with search results.

The team proposes changing the behavior of the Wikimedia search, but would like feedback from the communities to help make a smart decision. If you are interested in how search works, or see this as a possible disruption for your work, please learn more about this potential change and let the engineers know your thoughts. Thank you. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Would this work?

I've been wondering if I could make my own welcome message and then transclude it to welcome newbies. If I created a page titled, say, "User:White Arabian Filly/Welcome", put everything I want to say on it, and save it, could I transclude it to a newbie's talk by typing: 

{{User:White Arabian Filly/Welcome}}

? Would it appear in the same way the standard greeting does, or a userbox? I haven't done this but I'm curious. White Arabian Filly Neigh 22:14, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

The userspace transclusion would work exactly like a template transclusion. The appearance will depend on the content and not which namespace it's in. But welcome messages and most other user talk messages should be substituted so they don't change if the original page changes. Imagine your subpage is vandalized and lots of new users suddenly see the vandalized version instead of your own. See Wikipedia:Welcoming committee if you want to work on welcoming users. Note there are already many welcoming templates and not one standard greeting. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:37, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) @White Arabian Filly: Yes, but I'd run it by Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee first. There are actually quite a lot of user-hosted welcome templates, but notice that all of them are designed for substitution, not transclusion.
Its appearance depends entirely upon the way that it's designed. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:41, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
I've been a part of the Welcoming committee for a while, which was what prompted my curiosity.
In going through the Newartbot results, I often come across new users who are creating horse/horse racing articles, so I was wondering if I could make a welcome message inviting newbies to join WikiProject Equine or Horse racing, with links. (Kind of like Appleworm's astronomy greeting... the same concept, but horses, not stars and planets.)
Also, the standard greeting I was talking about is subst:welcome, which is the one I generally use and which seems to be favored by a lot of others as well. White Arabian Filly Neigh 22:47, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes! Yes! Every page is just a page, unless it's a special page (Help:pagename). If you move the page to the namespace, you'll have to document it. See Help talk:Template for questions not answered at Help:Template. Enjoy experimenting with the MediaWiki software in the Wikipedia template ecosystem. — Cpiral§Cpiral 23:01, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Database is locked

I'm currently trying to perform a delete+move action and every time I try I get the error message "Database is read-only: The database has been automatically locked while the slave database servers catch up to the master." Is everyone else having the same problem? Jenks24 (talk) 10:34, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm trying to delete some pages and am getting the same error. BethNaught (talk) 10:37, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Now getting a different error: "A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. Function: GlobalUsage::deleteLinksFromPage Error: 1290 The MariaDB server is running with the --read-only option so it cannot execute this statement (10.64.16.29)"
BethNaught (talk) 10:43, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Yep, I'm now getting that error. Jenks24 (talk) 10:45, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Wait, it's now working, I just deleted a page. Jenks24 (talk) 10:46, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Same here. One of life's little mysteries... BethNaught (talk) 10:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
@BethNaught: do you think this is related to this error? HTTP 500 v. database errors, looks likely? -- samtar talk or stalk 10:51, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
I'm no techie, so I shan't venture an opinion, sorry. (Obviously I wouldn't be surprised if it were related.) BethNaught (talk) 10:53, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
This was due to a temporary problem due to a very rare, but really nasty Commons database issue (which may in some cases affect other wikis): https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T139346 This required unscheduled maintenance on Commons, but only happened for 20-30 minutes and it is now resolved. --JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 08:58, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
@JCrespo (WMF): nasty stuff, glad to see it's sorted -- samtar talk or stalk 09:07, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

XML Parsing Error in Complete History XML Documents of Pages with Large Histories

Hello!

I am currently working on a project involving Wikipedia histories and modeling them using graphs.

However, we are running into problems when parsing through the XML document of the compilation of all the edits done to a page. Some of the larger documents (Ex: Barack Obama and Freddie Mercury) do not seem to be constructed properly and are returning the following error (this is from Freddie Mercury):

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Export&pages=Freddie+Mercury&history&action=submit Line Number 3201897, Column 3:<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/REC-xhtml1-20020801/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> --^

The XML is not well-formed, and this is preventing the document from opening, not just parsing.

What could be a fix for this? I am not too comfortable with XML, so I might be missing something. But I tried multiple different parsers, and even just tried opening the XML as a webpage, nothing worked.

Thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pratyush.kapur (talk • contribs) 17:57, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

@Pratyush.kapur: What exactly is/means "the document" that you try to open? It's a bit unclear to me how exactly you get your input data and how someone else could try to reproduce the problem. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:49, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
Those pages likely cannot be exported, because they are too big. You probably should use the api for things like this, or the offline database dumps if you want to do mass analysis. Not the XML export, it wasn't designed to do this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:46, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
@AKlapper (WMF): It is the XML document of a page including the whole edit history.

We are attempting to parse through that file as it holds all the information we want, and currently seems like the fastest way to get all the information we need. Here is the Wikipedia page explaining the format and its purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Export (It is the first example on the page)

@TheDJ: I am trying to figure out the API, I found it yesterday. However, I can't figure out how to go through edit histories using the revision IDs. What is the format of a page id? Because if I put in just a revision ID, it says "it is not a valid page id" when I try to open the wikipedia.page. I am trying to use the Python API: https://wikipedia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/code.html
@AKlapper (WMF): I looked a bit more at the document giving the error, and turns out it is failing because it is running into html code which is coming due to another error. The error message in the document is written in many languages, but it starts off with:

<title>Wikimedia Error</title> 

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
 <meta name="author" content="Mark Ryan, with translation by many people; see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_error_messages"/>

Then, further down, in the "technical" section, simply says: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Thank you for your help!

Subtitles on ogv clips will not show up

Hi there, sorry to come back. I found about three months ago (the English) subtitles were not showing up on a ogv clip, check in this article the clip Euskara iparraldean.ogv. On the other hand, the clip shows subtitles if opened in Commons, not the WP. I posted this months ago but lost track of the query, and the problem has not been sorted out yet. It is not a clip specific problem, other clips show the same problem. Thanks! Iñaki LL (talk) 17:55, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes this is a known problem. Now that I'm back from Wikimania, i hope to fix this the next two weeks. Thanks for reminding me. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:02, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Might be phab:T136616? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 21:14, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
The case showed is not the one I brought up, but the it may be the same. Commons shows subtitles, WP does not. Thanks for dealing with it. Iñaki LL (talk) 16:30, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
Also see phab:T137976, which I filed which appears to be related. ~ Matthewrbowker Drop me a note 18:13, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Cross-wiki notification icon not disappearing after being dismissed on one wiki

There seems to have been a recent update so that on all Wikimedia wikis you get the little red icon whenever you get an alert on any Wikimedia wiki. Unfortunately, for me, even if I've seen the notice on one wiki (and thus dismissed the red icon there), it keeps popping up on every new wiki I visit. Is this happening to anyone else? Am I perhaps not dismissing notifications correctly? Thanks! Happy Squirrel (talk) 00:32, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

@Happysquirrel: yes, you need to press that blue circle to dismiss them. And yes, it is quite annoying for people, who work on several projects, but I have got used to it. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:13, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
@Happysquirrel: Yes, everyone has this problem. The devs are looking at it in phab:T110731 and phab:T134855. They aim to reach a decision and solution within the next 2 weeks, once they've deeply examined some of the technical complexities that are involved in one of the possible ways to fix it. (Briefly, it is related to whether or not simply 'opening the flyout' should cause everything within it to be marked as "seen" (which is distinct from "read/unread"). This is complex, for example, because on small screens we might only see the top few notifications, and not the full 25 in the flyout. Plus we may have more than 25 new notifications in total. Plus there are the bundled/collapsed notifications to account for. Hence, it's not simple at either a code/database level, or at a UX level.). Sorry for the frustration/distraction. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

downloading/extracting the text from the cite journal template

Hello, I'm currently working on a project that assesses the use of scholarly journals in history on Wikipedia. Some years ago a researcher performed the analysis on scientific journal citations on Wikipedia: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1997/1872 . I lack the requisite computer skills to download the cite journal template so I was wondering if anyone could help me get the text--journal titles--from the cite journal template for the category of history articles. AugusteBlanqui (talk) 12:09, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

@AugusteBlanqui: I would suggest redirecting this to WP:BOTREQ. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:45, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
Sounds like a good idea. @AugusteBlanqui: please be aware that people tend to use Cite journal when they should rather use {{cite magazine}}. I. e. not every publication that has been cited with the journal template will turn out to be an academic journal, so even if you get a bot-created list of titles, you may have to do a bit of manual sorting to filter out the popular magazines. De728631 (talk) 19:55, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
@De728631: Thanks. I have no problem manual sorting the titles it's my weak computer skills that prevents me from extracting the information. It also may be the case that people cite scholarly journals without using the template. AugusteBlanqui (talk) 19:59, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Hang when editing Cusco

Using the Edit toolbar, the enhanced editing toolbar and wizards, when I try to edit Cusco (not using VE) it hangs, on Chrome, Firefox and Edge (latest versions) on Windows 10. Can edit other pages. Love to learn how to fix these myself....Cheers! Lfstevens (talk) 21:57, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Aggregate election polling graph

Hey!

I previously enquired about my issue at the Teahouse, however, as the issue was deemed technical in nature, I was advised to consult here instead.

I was interested in creating a wiki entry for the opinion polling for the next Slovenian election. I've finished compiling the polls in my sandbox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jakob_tekavec/sandbox ), but would like to add an aggregate polling graph to my article (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_Spanish_general_election,_2016 ), so I was wondering if anyone would be so kind as to explain how such a graph could be created, or if anyone would be willing to create such a graph and add it to the article?

Thank you in advance. Kind regards. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jakob tekavec (talk • contribs) 22:00, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Have you considered asking Impru20 how the Spanish graph was created? – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:12, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

API Question

Apologies if this is a silly question, but is it possible to use the API to fetch the username of the first editor to a page, for multiple pages with one query? I'm currently using the revisions module, but that only lets me set one titles= param at a time. Thanks in advance, FASTILY 05:52, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Rotated text in tables

Consider this example table:

Extended content
Lengthy header text Other lengthy header text Still other even lengthier header text
1 2 3
1 2 3
1 2 3

As evident, the width of each column is adjusted to the length of that column's header text. I wish to make the table more compact by rotating the header texts. I tried {{transform-rotate}}, but it ended in disaster:

Extended content
Lengthy header text Other lengthy header text Still other even lengthier header text
1 2 3
1 2 3
1 2 3

Not only is the width of the columns not affected at all, but the height of the header cells is not affected either, so the rotated header texts now have to leave the cells they belong to and spread much outside them, often covering up the contents of other cells. Help please! --Theurgist (talk) 15:39, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Help:Table#Vertically oriented column headers basically says that there is no consistent way to do this apart from using SVGs with the headers (which is a bit of a bother). —  crh 23  (Talk) 16:31, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Gallery doesn't correctly show transparent background of images

Example: United States federal executive departments#Seals

It should be like the mock on the right: the transparent part should be shown as the same color as the background.

 

--fireattack (talk) 05:58, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

@Fireattack: Could you post a screenshot of what you see? It looks the same to me —  crh 23  (Talk) 09:50, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
View United States federal executive departments#Seals in the skin:
In Vector, Modern and Cologneblue I see white in the transparent part and light grey in the margin. In MonoBook and Minerva I see the same color in both places. Tested in Firefox 47.0 and IE 9.0. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:33, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
Ah, I see that now, you're right. Weirdly enough, I can reproduce this in my sandbox but when I attempt to do so here I get yet another behaviour: the transparent part is the normal transparent background texture. I'm sure I'm missing something simple, but I don't know what.
—  crh 23  (Talk) 11:32, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
Because there is rule in Vector.css to change the background to #fff when it's main namespace.
.ns-0 .gallerybox .thumb img,.ns-2 .gallerybox .thumb img,.ns-100 .gallerybox .thumb img,.nochecker .gallerybox .thumb img {
    background:#fff;
}
--fireattack (talk) 16:36, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
I assume userspace too (considering that is where my sandbox is)? —  crh 23  (Talk) 17:04, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes, userspace is ns-2 there, and main namespace is ns-0 (no idea what ns-100 is. "Wikipedia:" namespace is ns-4).--fireattack (talk) 17:43, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
100 is Portal: according to Wikipedia:Namespace. SiBr4 (talk) 18:01, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
There's an easy way of finding out: {{ns:100}} → Portal - see H:MW#Paths. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:08, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Invisible edit?

Okay, I'm truly flummoxed here. The current version of Inverse trigonometric functions has some nonsense added to the first sentence. (I will delete it after I figure out what's going on.) The previous version of the page does not have that nonsense. So, that's easy, right? The last editor must have put it in. BUT NO. The diff does not show it being added; the nonsense text is now there, though, in the article below the diff. Move back to previous edit, the text is not there, nor is it being added. No sign of a revdel.

What is going on? — Gorthian (talk) 18:23, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

The article has been reverted and I'm unable to see any nonsense, but at a guess was it this nonsense that you saw? -- zzuuzz (talk) 18:31, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
Ah! It never occurred to me to check the template! Thank you for setting my world back in order, zzuuzz. — Gorthian (talk) 18:50, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Do a restore and article is added to watchlist.

Whenever I select several edits and click on restore, the article gets added to my watchlist. I just noticed this when my watchlist count has gone up by ~150 articles. Do you know if this is a recent change and how to disable it? I don't see an option under Preferences. Bgwhite (talk) 21:30, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

@Bgwhite: This doesn't happen to me; if it did, my watchlist would be full of even more crazy junk than it already is. ?There are two options in the watchlist tab of your preferences, "Add pages and files I delete to my watchlist" and "Add pages and files I move to my watchlist"; are either of them checked? Graham87 09:40, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
@Graham87: Neither options are checked. The only option checked is "Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist". Bgwhite (talk) 20:12, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Wiknic banner problem

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T139672

What's up with that wiknic banner popup? It has no "close" button to click it away and keeps popping up at random. Can this please be fixed? Thank you.--TMCk (talk) 21:13, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

WTF. Now an added X with hidden link? Scam tactics. You gotta be kiddin'.--TMCk (talk) 21:50, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Bug, not tactics. It's just been fixed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:48, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the update.--TMCk (talk) 02:16, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Gadget namespace

(Let me know if this has been asked before on a separate thread, don't have too much context) Is there a reason why sysops don't have the gadgets-edit or the gadgets-definition-edit permissions (or anyone for that matter as far as I can tell)? I understand that gadgets have been running smoothly in the MediaWiki namespace otherwise. And is some migration in the future planned? — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:38, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Start reading here mw:Thread:Talk:ResourceLoader/V2_testing/Questions_about_permission_model_and_developer_workflow (WARNING: NSF-Flow-Adverse-Readers! :D ) . — xaosflux Talk 15:57, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Looks like these are for "Gadgets 2.0" (phab:T31272). — xaosflux Talk 17:15, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Did some research, also found a thread here. Looks like some tasks tracked by phab:T31272 are on hold or in progress. phab:T125582 is not closed. So I'm thinking that, Gadgets 2.0 is not actually officially rolled out to wikis yet, and some tasks (like the Gadget Manager) not done yet, despite that namespaces and content models are in place. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 17:18, 8 July 2016 (UTC)


Moderator proposal

A Request for Comment on a proposal to create a new user group with an abbreviated set of administrator user-rights, as an option for editors to request instead of requesting the entire sysop user-right package. I welcome everyone's thoughts on this. - jc37 21:13, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Notification issue

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T139677

When I click on the message notification button, my alerts pop up, and when I click on the alert button, my messages pop up. Is anyone else having this problem? (I am using Google Chrome version 51.) —MRD2014 T C 20:40, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, it appears I am. Also Chrome 51. —  crh 23  (Talk) 20:44, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
I came here with a related issue. My notifications thing just showed a big "3", which when clicked produced a message of "Three new messages on your talk page". Nothing on the talk messages button, no orange bar (I set up the .js to produce an old-style "OBOD"), and the history of my talk page shows that there haven't been any new edits since the last time I edited. This is Internet Explorer 11 in Monobook. Nyttend (talk) 21:16, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
I'm able to confirm this as well. Pretty sure it was fine yesterday. Amaury (talk | contribs) 21:24, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
Bit more detail: as far as I can tell, this happens with all skins. The headings on the boxes are correct, but the actual notifications are in the wrong dropdowns. —  crh 23  (Talk) 21:27, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
I've been having multiple notification issues the last couple of days. Sometimes when I click on the notification, it fully opens up a message/alert page that lists all of them. The other problem I've been having, is that even when clicking on the notification/message does what it's supposed to, the alert stays up there for several minutes or longer, no matter how many times I click it to go away. — Maile (talk) 21:33, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
  • I've just had a notification for a message that was left like 6 days ago and yep I've got talkpage messages in the alert box and alert messages in the talkpage message box, Thanks, –Davey2010Talk 21:46, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

The notifications have been re-sorted based on "urgent/non-urgent" bucketing, with notifications that are more likely to require a response from us, sorted into the red Alerts section, and more purely informational (less urgent) notifications sorted into the blue Notices section. (The title/tooltip of the Notices section didn't update as it should have, and still says Messages. That will be fixed soon).

The re-sorting is based on a number of rounds of feedback and research - phab:T123018 and m:Research:Notifications user survey and mw:Notifications/Sorting schemes, with requests for feedback and announcements in various issues of Tech/News, and the wikitech-l/wikitech-ambassadors mailing lists, most recently in Tech News: 2016-26.

Overall, the change is based on community requests for a clearer indication of "what type of notification is waiting for me? [behind that colored number]". I.e. do we need to distract ourselves from our current task to look at the notification. This change should further help to resolve that problem. Feedback is appreciated, but please do take some time to look through the previous rounds of feedback, and detailed explanations for the change. Hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:05, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

The left menu includes talk page messages and "mention" notifications, while most of the other notifications including page curation, thanks, and links to created articles go on the other menu. An example, under my account, is "ColinFine mentioned you on Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions in 'How do I know if my submission has been apporved?'", where the diff is Special:Diff/728834936. This one I have added will of course also send a mention notification to ColinFine with my username in it: "GeoffreyT2000 mentioned you on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) in 'Notification issue'". GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:54, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

It's nice that the WMF works on the notifications, but there are quite a few issues with it recently, seems like rushed-out new versions instead of tested ones. Apart from the problem that clicking on the numbers sometimes produces a drop-down and sometimes produces a full page (like mentioned by Maile66 in this discussion), the right -side drop-down now has the header <echo-notification-message-text-only which is probably not intentional. The numbers shown also often don't match the actual number of unread notifications. Fram (talk) 06:38, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Re: Clicking the number (badge), sometimes going directly to Special:Notifications, instead of opening the flyout: This issue is a ramification of the order that elements of the page are sent to/loaded in our browsers. Basically/simplified, the servers send the basic HTML of the page first, so that we see (and can start reading) the content of articles/pages, before most of the additional elements such as images and JavaScript are fully loaded. Hence, if we click the notifications badge, before the page has fully loaded the JavaScript necessary for the flyout to work, we will be clicking on the badge that "no-JavaScript" users get. -- An identical problem is experienced by anyone who uses gadgets/scripts and tools like Twinkle, that add additional tabs to Vector in the "View/Edit/Edit Source/History/(watchlist)/More" top-bar (cactions), wherein the additional tabs nudge the default ones towards the middle of the screen (often just as we're about to click one of them). The more gadgets/scripts/tools we have enabled, the longer it (obviously) takes to load everything. So, it's a balancing act of what order to load page elements in. (Further details in mw:ResourceLoader and elsewhere.)
Re: seeing the string <echo-notification-message-text-only> - I cannot reproduce this, with various browsers, skins, and language settings. Are you still seeing it? Can anyone else confirm/reproduce? That was phab:T139712 and should now be fixed.
Re: the numbers shown not matching the number of visible notifications - A) The count is slightly different now as it counts the items within a bundled notification individually. B) there are some database updates running at the moment, that might cause actual incorrect numbers to be shown. Those should conclude within a week.
HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Another annoying part of the change is that numbers stay in the "badge" even after you have looked at all of the notifications - no matter the type. Yes the red or blue goes back to gray but the numbers stay. It would be nice if they reset to zero like they used to do. MarnetteD|Talk 22:11, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
MarnetteD, The notifications in the Alerts flyout previously marked themselves as "read" automatically, which some editors were unhappy about. It made it impossible to "mark as unread" a notification for longer time periods, if we wanted to get back to it later (in the day, week, etc), whilst still opening the flyout for newer notifications.
To solve this, you can either click the "Mark all as read" button at the top of the flyout (only shown when you have unread notifications), or click on the individual blue dots to mark selected notifications as read. HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:28, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply Quiddity (WMF). FYI the numbers stay even if I have clicked on and read the individual item but it is nice to know how to get them back to zero. Thanks again. MarnetteD|Talk 23:53, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Why are my 30-day log-ins lasting only 4 or 5 days?

New contributors' help chat advised me to contact you regarding this issue. (I'm using XP Pro, and Firefox version 43.0). I have a question about my log-ins to WP. I always choose the option to stay logged in for 30 days, and up until last month, I have stayed logged in for 30 day periods. However, the last 3 times I've logged in, I've only stayed logged in for 4-5 days. The last time I logged in was July 5, and I had to log in again today. Is it possible to figure out what the problem is? (I haven't made any changes to computer settings or to WP preferences). I just did an inventory of the expiration dates of the English WP cookies: most are set to expire in 30 days, a few are set to expire in 6 months to a year from now, and 2 are set to expire today (UseDC and UseCDNCache). I realize that this is not an issue of major importance, but I thank you for your attention. Akhooha (talk) 17:12, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Template transclusion issue

I spend a lot of my time fixing reference errors but I'm stuck on this one. This template[60] and this template [61] both contain the same reference[1] and when these are transcluded to Ulcerative colitis a footnote cite error occurs. Should one of the templates have the ref name changed?

References

  1. ^ Hanauer SB, Sandborn W (2001-03-01). "Management of Crohn's disease in adults" (PDF). American Journal of Gastroenterology. 96 (3): 635–43. doi:10.1111/j.1572-0241.2001.03671.x. PMID 11280528. Retrieved 2009-11-07.

Cheers CV9933 (talk) 18:33, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

It's a content issue. One uses |vauthors= and the other uses |author= (the |vauthors= should be preferred). Fix that.
  • {{cite journal |vauthors=Hanauer SB, Sandborn W | title = Management of Crohn's disease in adults | journal = American Journal of Gastroenterology | volume = 96 | issue = 3 | pages = 635–43 | date = 2001-03-01 | pmid = 11280528 | doi = 10.1111/j.1572-0241.2001.03671.x | url = http://www.acg.gi.org/physicians/guidelines/CrohnsDiseaseinAdults.pdf | format = PDF | accessdate = 2009-11-07 }}
  • {{cite journal | author = Hanauer SB, Sandborn W | title = Management of Crohn's disease in adults | journal = American Journal of Gastroenterology | volume = 96 | issue = 3 | pages = 635–43 | date = 2001-03-01 | pmid = 11280528 | doi = 10.1111/j.1572-0241.2001.03671.x | url = http://www.acg.gi.org/physicians/guidelines/CrohnsDiseaseinAdults.pdf | format = PDF | accessdate = 2009-11-07 }}
—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:49, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
I changed vauthors but the destination page Ulcerative colitis will still consider the same reference as defined multiple times. If I changed the ref name on one of the templates I think it would fix this issue, but might cause a different problem elsewhere. CV9933 (talk) 20:03, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
The wikitext content of the reference needs to be exactly the same in both templates to avoid the error. Even the extra space in "|vauthor=" versus "| vauthor=" causes the error. Renaming the reference would cause it to have two references to the same thing in the article. Anomie⚔ 20:33, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for all your help.CV9933 (talk) 22:01, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Watch List/Period of time to display not working

I only get 2 days consistently, even though I change it to 3 days and 7 days and 30 days. It used to work properly on the library computers I use. Something is stuck now. Jed Stuart (talk) 05:03, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Have you tried turning it off, waiting a minute for it to cool off, then turning it on again? That may dislodge the stuck something. Also, if you aren't signed in when commenting, it has probably reset to default. (It may also have something to do with the electronic harassment rays being beamed at you) I could be wrong. -Roxy the dog™ woof 06:03, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Can you select 3 days in the "Period of time to display" drop-down box at Special:Watchlist? If you click "Show" afterwards then does it jump back to 2 days and only display 2 days? What is the url afterwards? What happens if you click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?days=3? PrimeHunter (talk) 10:04, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I can change the period of time, click "show" and it stays 3 or whatever else I try. Also, the top line adjusts to the 3 making it 72 hours. The url afterwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?days=3&namespace=&action=submit. I clicked the link and everything reads as 3 days but still only 2 days is showing. Jed Stuart (talk) 00:17, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Does it look like you get exactly 48 hours? What number of changes does it say, e.g. "Below are the last 150 changes in the last 72 hours"? What is your first 3 settings "Days to show", "Number of edits to show" and "Group changes by page" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc? What is your first 3 settings "Days to show", "Maximum number of changes to show" and "Expand watchlist to show all changes" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:57, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
It says there are 250 changes in the last 72 hours. Todays changes start at 00.39 but yesterdays start at 13.58. So it is more like a day and a half showing. Jed Stuart (talk) 01:18, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
So the time isn't actually a round number but the number of changes is. That points to the changes being the limit. You didn't answer several of the questions. In particular, have you by any chance enabled "Expand watchlist to show all changes" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist, with 250 as "Maximum number of changes to show"? If so then the solution is obviously to increase the maximum. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:32, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
I have run out of time. I will have to get back to this in a couple of days. Jed Stuart (talk) 01:50, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
@Jed Stuart: Set "Maximum number of changes to show in watchlist:" to zero. This will cause all edits within the timeframe to be displayed, no matter how many - and it doesn't max out at 5000 like some lists. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:39, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Did that, and it is now working normally. It was set at 250. (My 3 days worth would always be under 250). Thanks Jed Stuart (talk) 03:28, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Determining one's browser

Is there a template or tag that determines a user's browser?

I'm wanting to modify {{Series overview}} per the following: With the usage of {{Series overview}} at List of Supernatural episodes#Series overview (for example), network2 is set to The CW and network2length is set to 10. I'm wanting to make it so that if network2length were set to current, its row-span would automatically span the entire table, instead it having to be increased every time a new season row is added to the table (to 11, then 12, etc).

In Chrome and other browsers, this is possible by setting the row-span to 100, as it doesn't break the bottom of the table, which it does in Firefox. In Firefox, this is possible by setting the row-span to zero, and it automatically spans the entire table, but this isn't possible via Chrome. This is the reason behind the original question. Alex|The|Whovian? 01:55, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

@AlexTheWhovian: You can determine a user's browser via JavaScript, but not through templates. There is a simpler solution, though - do the arithmetic to find the correct rowspan value. This becomes unwieldy very quickly with template code, but is easy in Lua. Also, there is a lot of repetition in the template, so it is already a good candidate for conversion to Lua, even without this new feature request. I'll take a look at it now. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:22, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Please don't use things like row-span=100 ... Just because something works in one browser for you, is no reason to break the Internet. Hacks like that will bite you in the ass later and they also might affect Accessibility. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:47, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
The HTML5 spec documents rowspan=0 to mean that "the cell is to span all the remaining rows in the row group", so Firefox is working per spec. If Chrome doesn't respect this, it's a problem for Google, not us. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:22, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
rowspan="0" was even in HTML 4 and 4.01 — kudos to Firefox for supporting it early. Webkit and Blink are still non-conforming, though, as are all versions of Internet Explorer up to and including 11. (I didn't test Edge.) Even if Webkit and Blink get it fixed, IE is IE, so keeping rowspan a positive integer will probably be the only safe method for many years to come. Sigh. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 05:16, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
I knew that I'd come across this before, but the other way around (see Template talk:Transperth platform#Firefox display issue). It seems that the calculations inside {{Transperth platform/row}} are relying on Chrome's non-standard behaviour, so the articles using that template break when viewed in a standards compliant browser like Firefox. In various browsers, check out Aubin Grove railway station#Platforms, where the   should be directly below the  , in the "Platform" column. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:09, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

My bot can't edit extended protected pages

Cyberbot II (talk · contribs) has a bot flag and with it the needed right to edit extended confirmed pages. However I see several articles that the bot failed to edit, show up with the log, with the following reason, "protectedpage: The "extendedconfirmed" right is required to edit this page". Why is this?—cyberpowerChat:Limited Access 21:09, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Special:ListGroupRights does display that userright for bots. I've granted it the access - does the problem persist? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:20, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
I can tell you in about 5 minutes.—cyberpowerChat:Limited Access 21:23, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
no dice. Still getting the error.—cyberpowerChat:Limited Access 21:33, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
That is expected behavior - as our ECP implementation is very limited - adding the flag is easy enough (and can be requested at WP:PERM under the existing policy, so long as the bot operator is extended confirmed themselves). Should WP:ECP2016 change the policy, we may want to add this to bots by default. — xaosflux Talk 21:27, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678: see Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Extended_confirmed_protection_policy#Bots. — xaosflux Talk 21:29, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Cyberbot II is in the bot usergroup and per Special:ListGroupRights this group has extendedconfirmed, but it doesn't appear to be working. It's a technical issue.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:31, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, lets see if manually fixing it resolved the issue - I'll do a test with my bot as well. — xaosflux Talk 21:35, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Note, my bot Fluxbot was able to edit through ECP without manually having ECP group (Special:Diff/729238014). — xaosflux Talk 21:37, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678: - if you manually log on via the web interface can you make the edit under your bot account? — xaosflux Talk 21:39, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Are you using OAuth/BotPasswords? Did you grant the proper userrights if you're using those methods? Legoktm (talk) 21:39, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
I used OAuth, and what grants? I created these consumers before EC came into existence.—cyberpowerChat:Limited Access 21:40, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Log in as the bot, go to Special:BotPasswords - see if it has "edit protected pages". — xaosflux Talk 21:46, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
I'm not using BotPasswords. I'm using OAuth.—cyberpowerChat:Limited Access 21:48, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
To my understanding OAuth grants certain permissions. Does it give extendedconfirmed, if it works like that?Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:03, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
It does, but I don't know how to alter them once they're created. I also don't have my bot passwords at the moment to log into them atm, since they're pseudo-scrambled for security.—cyberpowerChat:Offline 22:10, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Log in and go to meta:Special:OAuthConsumerRegistration/list - you are still looking for "Edit protected pages". — xaosflux Talk 22:34, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Note: If that IS still in there, and not working - we may actually need to open a phab ticket to include that as an oauth grant type (as it didn't used to exist) (which also identified a flaw in the "create new protection" dependency workflow). — xaosflux Talk 22:38, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

It looks like your oauth consumer does not have that checked. — xaosflux Talk 22:39, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Note: I'm not seeing a good way to "EDIT" the grants on an OAUTH consumer (unlike in botpasswords) - you may need to regenerate a new consumer--will feedback here if I find something. — xaosflux Talk 23:36, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Need to regenerate, warning this may change your keys.
[19:40] <xaosflux> Is there a mechanism on meta: to change the grants of an existing consumer?
[19:40] <xaosflux> e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:OAuthListConsumers/view/4fc51567780d99e946537deeb115544c
[19:41] <xaosflux> I want to add more grants to my own private consumer
[19:41] <bd808> no. to change grants you need to submit a new request with a different consumer version
[19:41] <xaosflux> ok, use the same grant name, new version number?
[19:41] <bd808> yeah, that's the best way to do it
[19:41] <xaosflux> Thanks - OK to repost this on wiki?
[19:42] <bd808> sure
— xaosflux Talk 23:42, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Tested, it will definitely change your keys. — xaosflux Talk 23:46, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Created new consumers, and tested, and it works now. Thanks everyone.—cyberpowerChat:Online 06:20, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Just a note for future searchers: botpasswords and/or oauth consumer rights settings don't "give" you the permissions - they "restrict" the actions that can be used when authenticating that way. The account used must actually have the permission or it will still be refused. — xaosflux Talk 11:38, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Need technical help

I want that the my page background should not be white. I want to it be Silver or Dark Gray.

Can anyone edit these pages to change color?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Rambo_X-Terminator/vector.css&action=edit&redlink=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Rambo_X-Terminator/vector.js&action=edit&redlink=1

--Rambo X-Terminator (talk) 10:12, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Try this in your CSS:
.mw-body {background: silver;}
PrimeHunter (talk) 12:09, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter:, Thanks after doing that the main article background has become silver. But, the upper margin, the left margin is still white. Is there any way those two can also have silver background?

This is the snapshot: https://postimg.org/image/qebqzfs47/

Rambo X-Terminator (talk) 12:47, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

You'll want body {background: silver} too —  crh 23  (Talk) 12:59, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
@Crh23: Thanks, now the left margin also has become silver.

This is how I can see pages now,

https://postimg.org/image/f6sihq0lz/

But, the upper part of the page above the article title is still white. I hope it can be changed like these two. 

Rambo X-Terminator (talk) 13:19, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-28

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

Recent changes

  • A new image scaler fixed a number of bugs for showing SVG files. Some new problems turned up. [62][63][64]
  • Notifications are grouped by types. They are now counted by number of notifications and not by unread groups. That change may increase the number of notifications displayed. The earlier way of counting was often incorrect. Unread notifications will also be displayed first. [65][66][67]
  • Special:Notifications now has a maximum width for the notifications list on desktop computers. This allows long titles and descriptions to be cut properly. Notifications are now also better parsed. [68][69][70]

Problems

  • On 5 July Wikimedia Commons had problems and could not be edited for 20 minutes. For a short while after that the recent changes log and some gadgets were not working properly. It affected administrative actions on other projects too. [71]
  • Users who have multiple unread notifications can mark them as read by visiting Special:Notifications page on their wiki.

Changes this week

  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 July. It will be on all wikis from 14 July (calendar).

Meetings

  •   You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:14, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Editor analysis tools in nav bar

  Resolved

Until recently I had a set of links in my nav bar (by the edit buttons, twinkle menu, move links, etc.) that would appear on user pages that pointed to tools like X!'s edit counter, non-automated edit counter, requests for permissions, and so on. About a week ago these went away, and I can't figure out why (I'm sure I'm missing something simple) and I can't remember how I got them in the first place. Where did they come from, where did they go? Thanks —  crh 23  (Talk) 16:56, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

What browser (including version) are you using? Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 17:06, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
@Crh23: See if you have the gadget disabled. - NQ (talk) 17:08, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
Perfect, that was it (I had checked the gadgets, but didn't see it). Must have disabled it accidentally. —  crh 23  (Talk) 17:22, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Last chance

An API change is scheduled for tomorrow (less than 24 hours from now). Bots and user scripts (e.g., Huggle 2) will not be able to use http://. They must use https:// Please read the details: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-May/085618.html

You can read the list of known affected bots/script users at phab:T136674. There may be more, especially for bots or scripts that have not been used during the last 6 to 8 weeks. If you are worried about this, and you see this message in the next few hours, then you may want to consider running your bot or script now, so that you're "caught up" before this change happens early tomorrow, just in case you run into difficulties.

If you are affected and you need information to figure out which piece is using http://, then the devs can give you a user agent string and similar details from the logs. Tell me (or BBlack (WMF)) if you need more details about your bot or script.

Good luck, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF) and BBlack (WMF): Please mention this at Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard, an other likely place for affected users to go. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 20:52, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
I did the BOTNs (all of them, not just enwiki's) first.  ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:02, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Categories in mobile

Is there a way to view categories when a page has been loaded in mobile view? Since I have a basic phone, navigating by selecting links is much more important there than on my normal computer, but I'm totally unable to use the category system because category links don't appear on pages, and ordinary navboxes (e.g. {{Dubuque County, Iowa}}) also don't appear. The only way to view either one is to visit the category or template directly, by typing its address into the URL, and of course that can take a while on this type of phone. Nyttend (talk) 23:49, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

 
What it would look like at smartphone screen sizes.
Don't know about categories, but navboxes are intentionally left out from mobile version. Read intro at /doc. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:20, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
This is being tracked in phab:T24660 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:28, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Double question: (1) What's the rationale for not displaying navboxes? Presumably if they were always collapsed by default, they wouldn't occupy a ton of vertical space. (2) What's the mechanism that excludes them from displaying? Nyttend (talk) 15:09, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
I think the issue is horizontal space. Imagine that wide box on a three-inch-wide smartphone screen. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
No matter how wide or narrow the screen on my laptop browser, the navbox fills the width: it expands when I zoom out or widen the browser window, and when I make the window so narrow that the sidebar is as wide as the rest of the article, the navbox likewise contracts in width. It's like ordinary text this way, and distinctly different from infoboxes, which are routinely too wide for my phone, and which don't work properly when I reduce the size of my browser window. Would navboxes be unable to fit themselves to the size of the screen on a mobile phone? Nyttend (talk) 17:13, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Well, take a look at the screenshot. It would apparently look something like that: a full screen of tiny text. A fingertip is about three rows tall, so it would be very difficult to click on anything without zooming in. Oh, and that's a simple navbox. Imagine something like this in that shape:
That kind of complex navbox would turn into multiple screens of illegible links. I agree that readers on mobile do need a "go next" feature, but I don't think that showing them a made-for-desktop navbox is a good way to go about it. (It may not even be a good way for non-editors go find an interesting article. We've got no evidence that typical readers use navboxes much.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:52, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
(That's weird. I wonder why the rest of the page is indented?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
(Fixed).--Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:01, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Nyttend asked "what's the mechanism that excludes them from displaying?" - navboxes belong to the navbox class, which in the site's mobile CSS has been given the declaration display:none;. Plenty about that in the archives of this page. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:38, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
Navboxes aren't important to me, but the categories are. I sometimes forget to add cats to new articles because I can't see them, and if they could be made visible on mobile it would be much easier. White Arabian Filly Neigh 22:03, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
I have asked around, and it turns out that you can get cats on Mobile. Go to the main menu (three bars in the upper right corner), choose "Settings" (gear icon), and tick the box to opt into "Beta". Save your changes. After this (reload the page if necessary), you will see a "Categories" button at the end of every article, next to the "Talk" button. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Edit summaries in diff view

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T139722

After Thursday update, edit summaries are no longer italic (per default) in diff view ("Watch List/Period of time to display not working: set "Maximum number of changes to show in expanded watchlist:" to zero" and the other one here), at least in Monobook. I assume some JS was added there, as summary is in italic after some short time period. That was intended or it's some bug? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:16, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, thanks for picking my edits as examples! But when I view them, the ES is italicised both in watchlist and in diff view. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:04, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
It looks normal to me as well, even in monobook—but only when logged in. Eman235/talk 19:24, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
You're welcome :) Yes, in watchlist, user contribs, recent changes they are all in italics, but not in diff view... OK, let's take another project - do you see edit summaries in italics? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:41, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Not me, when logged in and in vector. Eman235/talk 21:47, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Upright text - both MonoBook and Vector. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:02, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Having been alerted to this, I'm looking more carefully at diffs as they load - and although the end result on English Wikipedia (in MonoBook) is always that the ES is in italic text, there is sometimes a short period when its definitely upright, before it then tilts to the right, implying a late-loading style sheet. The rule in question is 
span.comment {
  font-style: italic;
  unicode-bidi: -moz-isolate;
  unicode-bidi: isolate
}
but I don't know where that comes from. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:09, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
It is not working on Serbian Wikipedia either. There's no italic when comparing diffs or in the preview of edit summary on sr.wiki project. On English Wikipedia italics is being added to the normal text for two mentioned cases (it can be seen if page loading time, for preview, is long). --Obsuser (talk) 16:35, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

This issue should be resolved on all wikis now (and for all skins). See phab:T139722 for details. Matma Rex talk 00:58, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Login problem

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T119736

(ticket:2016070710009847) An editor, deepugeorge14, is attempting to log in and received the following error

[V35DhApAIDkAAHLS5H4AAAAM] 2016-07-07 11:56:52: Fatal exception of type "Exception"

I urged the editor to try again, and the report is that the same error occurred.

Anyone know the problem?--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:07, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

On IRC I was told that this is "Could not find local user data for Deepu14basketball@commonswiki" hence phab:T119736. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
I think I have fixed this. There was some sort of database issue at the time that the account was created. The CentralAuth database recorded that an account had been created for this new user on commons, but the commons database did not end up with a record for the user. The "fix" I made was to manually delete the record in the CentralAuth database that pointed to commons. I can now load the Special:CentralAuth page for the Deepu14basketball account. The commons attachment should be made automatically on the next login attempt. --BDavis (WMF) (talk) 18:04, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
@BDavis (WMF): I got a similar email from user:RuslanaRB (ticket:2016071110003951) can you see if the same fix will work?--S Philbrick(Talk) 00:07, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
@Sphilbrick: Should be fixed now (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACentralAuth&target=RuslanaRB) Hopefully we will get a code fix soon to at least keep this from blocking logins. --BDavis (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the extremely prompt response.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:31, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Category sorting

I am not sure where to make this request, and figured that this was as good a place as any. What I would like to do is make Category:Articles to be merged after an Articles for deletion discussion sortable or organised by date of deletion discussion. Then I can just come in occasionally and merge the old articles, allowing other editors who are probably more familiar with the topics a chance to merge the more recent ones. I did attempt it myself at one point[72], but not only did it not work I screwed up AnomieBOT[73]. Pinging John of Reading and Anomie from that discussion. Thanks in advance. AIRcorn (talk) 07:16, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

The underlying module is Module:Message box, and I see that it can handle sort keys for categories. You'd need to set a sortkey - for example a date in the format CCYY-MM-DD - in the {{afd-merge to}} template, pass that through {{ambox}} and so on. Unfortunately, it's not at all clear from Module:Message box what the parameter name is. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:14, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Redrose, if you meant line cat = string.format('[[Category:%s|%s]]', cat, sort), then it looks like that sort parameter is internal, not for everybody use. But I may be wrong. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:10, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I do mean that line. Unfortunately, Modules are written in Lua, so all I can do is guess... there's no easy way of working out what may be passed in as a parameter. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:03, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
If there is something like args.foo, args[foo], frame.args.foo or frame.args[foo] in code, that may mean, that foo can be used as parameter. frame.args and args could be something like {{{ in wikicode. But there are much more competent people here, who can give you a better answer. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:45, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Edgars2007 is correct - the sort variable in cat = string.format('[[Category:%s|%s]]', cat, sort) from Module:Message box is internal, and currently cannot be accessed directly by any template arguments. It wouldn't be hard to add such arguments, though, as the internal mechanism is already there. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:56, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
@Aircorn: I've had a go at adding the sort key manually in the template. Is that what you were looking for? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:58, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Appears to be working, the first page listed at Category:Articles to be merged after an Articles for deletion discussion is Terrassa Metro where the AfD closed as "merge" on 25 August 2015; and the last one is Point No. 1 (song), closed on 11 July 2016. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:05, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
Thanks everyone, this is all Greek to me. It will work for my purposes though. My only concern would be if the backlog built up to 200+ again that it could get a bit ugly. I don't suppose there is an easy way to split them out by month or even year (e.g. December 2015, January 2016, February 2016 etc). AIRcorn (talk) 05:01, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
No, because category pages only subdivide by the first character of the sort key. In these cases, the sort key is similar to "2016-07-11" so the first character of the sort key is "2", so they're listed under "2". --Redrose64 (talk) 08:01, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Squashed boxes for audio file

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T137632

I'm not sure why the boxes for the audio file are now suddenly smaller, for example in Poker Face (Lady Gaga song) and other pages, making the texts look squashed and ugly. Oddly enough here in WP:CMF the boxes for the sound files look normal. Is there some settings that I'm not aware of? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hzh (talk • contribs) 13:22, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

This is a regression due to T137632. Will be looked into. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:40, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Authorlink problem

In this edit here I introduced authorlinks to Clifford Longley, but they do not appear to have generated the wikilinks that they should. Have I missed something obvious or is there a problem? DuncanHill (talk) 21:39, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: The cite template used is Template:Cite newspaper The Times, which does not seem to support the 'authorlink' parameter. - NQ (talk) 21:48, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
Ah thanks, not encountered that before. Got around it by linking in the authorfield. DuncanHill (talk) 21:54, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Further to my query above, could someone add support for the authorlink field to Template:Cite newspaper The Times please? DuncanHill (talk) 21:57, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

The specific-source templates don't have a ton of parameters like the general templates. You can just make a piped link in the author parameter like |author=[[Clifford Longley|Longley, Clifford]]. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:46, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I know how to add a link when there isn't an authorlink field available, I did mention that I had done that. Can someone edit the Times template to make the authorlink parameter available? — Preceding unsigned comment added by DuncanHill (talk • contribs) 14:41, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia.org portal update

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation Portal team has recently completed an A/B test on the Wikipedia.org portal. These tests were to see if a new design would be easier to navigate. This design added a dropdown that contained all the languages by article count.

The test results found that visitors were more likely to click through to a link. With the new design there was a lower amount of 'non-action' on the page. We also tested the page with many Wikipedia users. We received comments that the new page design was pleasing and less cluttered.

With this information, we would like to promote this into production on the Wikipedia.org portal. We would like to ask the community for feedback and suggestions.

Thank you and cheers from the Discovery Portal team! CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

some kind of new bug somewhere in the "hidden begin / hidden end" templates?

There looks like some kind of new bug in {{hidden}}, although the template hasn't been edited since 2014 so it must be somewhere further up the line, where you'd think it'd have been notice, but it's been going on for a couple days, so I guess not.

"hidden begin -- hidden end" used to work great

They really did!

But now...
Really

See? It treats {{Col-end}} like a {{hidden end}} (it never did before) and on top of that it causes the text after the {{Col-end}} to be center-justified (and it never did that before either).

And I checked on earlier versions of my page. It's not my code. Something's changed, but how do I find out what?

And it's putting this text (right here) above some of the text inside the hidden section, even though I'm writing it below in the source... it's really messed up. Herostratus (talk) 06:02, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

It appears that the recent changes to {{col-begin}} (see Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2016 July 2#Template:Multicol) required changes to {{col-end}} which in turn had repercussions for {{col-begin-small}} that were not addressed by BU Rob13 (talk · contribs) or Frietjes (talk · contribs). There's a <div> / </div> imbalance. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:06, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
I have added [74] an initial <div> to {{col-begin-small}} like in Special:Diff/729213165 to match the ending </div> in Special:Diff/729213521. I added a missing {{col-end}} to the above example which looks right now. So does User:Herostratus after a purge. Other affected pages may need purging to fix errors faster than when the job queue gets to them, but in many cases it appears to not have caused problems. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:25, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
Not quite sure why I was pinged; I didn't make any edits beyond removing the tfm notices from those templates once I closed it. ~ Rob13Talk 13:32, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

 Appears to be fixed and thank you, everything all Sir Garnet now! Herostratus (talk) 13:44, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: You were notified because you closed the TfD, and also listed the templates in the holding cell with the somewhat vague instruction "and related templates". I think that it would have been better to specify those templates, so that the person who actually performed the merge could do so without leaving a problem situation. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:03, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
The related templates were all listed in the linked discussion, which a merger must read in order to know what's being merged. Additionally, this error was caused by the introduction of div tags in {{Col-begin}} etc., not a merge. As best I can tell, the added div tags didn't bring this any closer to the merge; I'm not sure why they cited the deletion discussion. ~ Rob13Talk 22:12, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Edit not shewing on watchlist

This edit I made to an article on my watchlist is not shewing up when I look at my watchlist. Any ideas why? DuncanHill (talk) 15:55, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Do any of your own edits show up on your watchlist? None of my edits show up on my watchlist as I have checked the box to not show them, I really don't need to see what I have edited). -- GB fan 16:00, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Hello DuncanHill. The edit does show on you contributions page. Are you sure that you have added the article to your watchlist? I can't check that but if the star next to the search box is blue then it is on your list and something weird is going on. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 16:04, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes it is on my watchlist, it has been on my watchlist for years, and the edit I made was in response to some obvious vandalism appearing in my watchlist. And yes, I do normally see my edits on my watchlist. DuncanHill (talk) 16:06, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
I see the same problem after watchlisting it, only this edit shown for today. No clue why as I see edits made later. ―Mandruss ☎ 16:09, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
Mandruss, that's the edit that I then reverted. I saw it in my watchlist then, but now I see nothing. DuncanHill (talk) 16:19, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
Hmmm, well I tried unwatchlisting and then rewatchlisting it and it still didn't appear. Then I made a small edit, and that, latest, edit is now shewing. Very strange. DuncanHill (talk) 16:29, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
I also have had Bodmin on my watchlist for ages, and the last edit that showed was that by TROAN LTD. Duncan's revert doesn't appear. I've now made a test edit to the page which appears in the watchlist, as does Duncan's second edit. Just one edit missing then - a glitch in the database?  —SMALLJIM  16:36, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
Now seeing one edit for each of Smalljim, DuncanHill, and TROAN LTD. I use the watchlist options that show only the usernames and number of edits, btw. I guess DH's first edit is lost forever as to watchlist, although shown in page history and contribs. Suggest letting it go as a one-off mystery unless seen again. ―Mandruss ☎ 16:57, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
Go to Special:Preferences, then select the "Watchlist" tab, check the box under "Advanced options" that says "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent", and finally click "Save". GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:14, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Where do the images come from on https://www.wikipedia.org/?

This has probably been asked before but the archive search function is just not working for me (which is kinda funny seeing as this question is about the search function). Anyways, when you type in an article name on the main wikipedia.org splash page, images come up with the list of possible matches. Where do these images come from? How are they chosen? Is it WikiData? Is it just the first image on a page that gets displayed? I know the code to that page is on meta but I don't know HTML enough to discern if the answer is in there somewhere. Clarification would be appreciated and I thought here would have better answers than the help desk. Thanks! --Majora (talk) 04:04, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

@Majora: When you type into the search box, the page queries the MediaWiki API for the Wikipedia corresponding to the language that is selected in the dropdown menu. The query contains the pageimages property, which gives you the main image for the page. The algorithm that decides this image comes from mw:Extension:PageImages. It looks at all the images on a page and gives them a score for things like how far up the page they are, what size they are, whether they are on the image blacklist, and whether they are freely licensed. The image with the highest score is selected to be passed to the API. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 05:03, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
@Mr. Stradivarius: Well that is far more complicated than I thought it would be. Thanks for the explanation. That clears up a lot. --Majora (talk) 23:03, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
A2. They come from Free media repository (Commons wiki). To search the media archives for, say, violin, use any search box on any page, and specify the File namespace: File: violin. Those search results are thumbnails from the media repository. (Without the File namespace, they don't show images.) Click on an interesting search result, then click on View on Commons. Note the URL change. There you can use that search box, and their categories to find comparable media files. See Help:Searching for how to search (and the draft for details) categories using the Category namespace, and the incategory search parameter. — Cpiral§Cpiral 03:02, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

converting red links

I,m an active wikipedian on urdu and english wiki i mostly translate pages from eng to urdu wiki so i have to to copy articles and then paste on urdu wiki ,when i paste eng link ,so it will convert into red link,Now my question is that is there any shortcut or tool that i can convert these link into existing relative urdu articles with out wasting time in searching then again copy paste.--Baltistani (talk) 13:34, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

The bigger problem you may be having with copy paste is loss of attribution, you may want to discuss, on urwiki, enabling enwiki->urwiki tranwiki imports. Then you can import the enwiki page along with attribution directly (you would still need to translate). This can be requested via phabricator if not already enabled. — xaosflux Talk 23:08, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
The full instructions don't mention a tool. Even if someone could write some SQL using multilingual tables to generate a list of titles here (English) that already existed there (Urdu), you'd still have to match each redlink to that list manually. Cheers! — Cpiral§Cpiral 02:13, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
You probably want the new mw:Content translation tool, which is the last item in w:ur:Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. User:Amire80 can answer any questions you have about it. I think you will find that it is much easier than what you've been doing. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:11, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
thanks all for this response i just have resolved my problem by enabling a tool in preference.--Baltistani (talk) 06:52, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Changing the default state of a navbox

How do I edit the code of the navbox Template:Halcyoninae to specify the default state as collapsed rather than autocollapse? The Navbox is large and intrusive. I tried changing the line in the code 

|state = {{{state|autocollapse}}}

to 

|state = {{{state|collapsed}}}

but this didn't appear to change the behaviour. I could hard wire the template with 

| state=collapsed

but then editors wouldn't be able to override the default state when the template in invoked in an article. Thanks. Aa77zz (talk) 13:07, 13 July 2016 (UTC) 

|state = {{{state|collapsed}}}
in [75] is correct. If you didn't see it collapsed then maybe you viewed it on a page that needed a purge to update after the template edit, or already set the state parameter, or maybe you used a browser without JavaScript. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:24, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
"Purge" was the problem. I've been caught by this before ... Many thanks. Aa77zz (talk) 13:35, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Alerts/notices

Recently I noticed that talk page messages were moved to the red "Alerts" notification box and thanks to the blue "Notices" one, and I appreciated that change, but it seems it was reverted (and "Notices" is now "Messages" again). Is the WMF doing some sort of A/B testing? This is just going to confuse users. Either way, I didn't see any announcement about this change or its reversal. nyuszika7h (talk) 14:14, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

See #Notification issue. The MediaWiki version was rolled back from 1.28.0-wmf.9 to 1.28.0-wmf.8 yesterday due to phab:T119736: mw:MediaWiki 1.28/Roadmap. Special:Version confirms we are currently on 1.28.0-wmf.8. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:27, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
The alerts move is listed in mw:MediaWiki 1.28/wmf.9#Echo:
mw:MediaWiki 1.28/wmf.9 was linked when the version was announced in Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 147#Tech News: 2016-27. The alerts move was mentioned earlier under Future changes in Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 147#Tech News: 2016-26. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:41, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Who wants to be a MediaWiki hacker?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T139702

I'd like a new feature for the Global User Contributions tool. The goal is to be able to filter by dates, e.g., to find out if/where the user edited this year or this month, rather than to find out where the user edited ever. I will use this mostly to figure out whether an editor is still active anywhere, but I think that global sysops and other people will use it when dealing with cross-wiki spam and similar problems.

Doing this requires (I'm told) basic PHP coding skills and a basic understanding of SQL for querying the wiki database. If you've never worked on MediaWiki stuff before, then mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker has some basic information that may be relevant.

The code is in Gerrit:

and there is some information in the feature request that I filed in Phab. Also, I think I can promise a reasonably prompt code review for whoever wants to tackle it. Is anyone interested? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Getting random pages by size

I know how to get a random page, and I know how to get pages in a specific size. But how can I get a random page in a specific size? I want to list pages from different wiki's, so I cant use 'apfrom=...' because I don't know the target language letters. I just want a random page above a certain minimum size and below a certain maximum size. How can I get it? רן כהן (talk) 05:32, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Given how the random pages are generated, I don't think this is possible. At least not directly, and not efficiently. Darkdadaah (talk) 13:35, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
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