Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 172

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Village pump (technical) archive

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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created timestamp

Resolved

-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 18:16, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

I created Template:Did you know nominations/151 North Franklin with its first published edit at 03:30, 25 December 2018. However, the scripts that I am running show "Created by TonyTheTiger (talk | contribs) on Mon, Dec 24 2018, 21:30:50 (Central Standard Time)" at the top of the page. I never noticed that this was shown in local time instead of UTC. How can I get this script to make my page show UTC times?-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 03:40, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

@TonyTheTiger: first check your timezone in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering - if you want UTC times but have set this to something else change that. If that isn't it, can you provide more information about "the scripts" you are using? — xaosflux ^Talk 04:09, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

User:TonyTheTiger/vector.js imports User:Eizzen/PageCreator.js. User:Eizzen/PageCreator says how to choose between local time and UTC, but UTC is supposed to be default and it doesn't work to set it with the specified method. I think User:Eizzen/PageCreator.js should change that.useUTC === true to that.options.useUTC === true. . User:Eizzen has not edited since 2017. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:45, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

PrimeHunter, Thx. How can we get this change enacted? Does Eizzen have exclusive powers?-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 13:21, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Interface administrators can edit it. Some of them monitor this page. Eizzen might respond to an email, or you could copy the code to your own userspace. The latter wouldn't help other users of the script but there are only around a dozen. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:05, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

TonyTheTiger, I have now modified that page as described. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:53, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

TheDJ, I am now seeing GMT instead of Central Standard Time at the top of my pages. Still not UTC.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 02:50, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Xaosflux, would you care to comment here where I think other experts are watching.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 01:36, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

GMT and UTC are the same for all practical purposes (unless you are navigating a ship or aligning an astronomical telescope) - there's only a fraction of a second in it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:26, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Redrose64 year round?-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 06:22, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:01, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Date format in signatures as viewed by unregistered users

Is there a reason why the date format in signatures is dd mmm yyyy when viewed by unregistered users? I presume it's just the way the css is configured but is there any background for that configuration rather than mmm dd, yyyy? Nthep (talk) 13:28, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

@Nthep: signature dates are not stored as any sort of typed data value, they are simply text and readers see them just as they are in the wikitext. In fact everyone sees them this way unless they specifically implement a hack to see them some other way. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:06, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

I get that but was there any reason why it's the way round it is, other than that's the way the developer set it? Nthep (talk) 14:29, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

I think that day-month-year is more common around the world than month-day-year, which IIRC is pretty much just a North American thing (or maybe more generally an English thing?). It also orders the time units by length. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 14:34, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

It's just a North American thing, I live in the UK and we use DDMMYY. ^{[Username Needed]} 15:10, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

See also Date format by country#Usage map. Some wikis use another date format. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:42, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Is there an example somewhere of such a "hack" I can use to make the standard sig times display the same way as my (localized ISO-3166) history/contrib times (e.g. to convert "01:23, 16 January 2019 (UTC)" to "2019-01-15T17:23")? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 15:12, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

@AlanM1: there is a Gadget for that, see Wikipedia:Comments in Local Time for documentation and limitations. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:20, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

I think you'll also want to check out Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering, specifically the "Date format" and "Time format" sections. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 15:23, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

@Amorymeltzer: Thanks. I already had that set, affecting the history and contribs pages.

@Xaosflux and Gary: Just what I wanted

. I copied User:Gary/comments in local time.js to User:AlanM1/comments in local time.js and tweaked it a bit to render e.g. "2018-12-24T19:40, Monday (23 days ago)". I added two new boolean config items to LocalComments: dropOffset drops the "(UTC±n)" suffix; diffLast causes it to render the date and time together as shown (like the gadget setting mentioned above) and put the dayOfTheWeek and descriptiveDifference last. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 21:01, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Emergency server switch is NOT HERE

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T213864

Quick note, while everyone else is trying to sort out MassMessage problems: There's going to be a partial m:server switch tomorrow, because of hardware problems; it's just like all the previous ones, except affecting only some (most) wikis and with much less planning. It will NOT affect the English, German, French, or Russian Wikipedias (or several smaller places). Check the Phab link for the list of affected wikis.

On a side note, please ping me if you need my attention this week (or any time you think something's important, ever). Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

From the title, I thought we were blocking someone that had named themself Emergency server switch as WP:NOTHERE. Natureium (talk) 20:00, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

<grin>

The task's been closed, so this is done. It sounds like editing was blocked on those wikis for less than four minutes. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:52, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

This isn't WP:ANI :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:53, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Galobtter, so tempted to create the account named Emergency server switch just to say that it is here... Home Lander (talk) 20:35, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, was someone looking for me? Emergency Server Switch (talk) 21:23, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Soooooooooooooock! Natureium (talk) 21:39, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Template Data Table

Question... When adding TemplateData is there any way to edit it basically in a spreadsheet? It is so time consuming to use the data editor, constantly going back and forth between different params... --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 19:26, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: There's some other tools you can try listed at Wikipedia:TemplateData/Tutorial#Tools, or you can edit the wikitext directly (but you need to be careful to keep the JSON syntax valid, or the page will refuse to save) - Evad37 [talk] 00:53, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

@Evad37: thanks!!! --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 03:29, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Floating 6

Can anyone fix the floating bold "6" here? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Beatles_(album)&oldid=878971860#Charts I can't seem to find where this is in the code. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:55, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

@Koavf:

Done --DannyS712 (talk) 04:12, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:36, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Weird "Revert"

Could someone explain what happened Here? ^{[Username Needed]} 15:45, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

An IP user used the "undo" button, presumably from the page history, to undo Nochorus's edit. The undo functionality, unlike rollback or Twinkle, can work on edits that aren't the most recent. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 15:51, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Usage metrics of a script

Is there any particular way to answer questions like "How many people use my script right now ?" or "How many times is a script used per day ?".(especially if the script in question is a unconventional one like User:FR30799386/undo.js ?) << FR 12:20, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

You could query for the ads it leaves in the edit summaries. It's miserably slow, though. Here's the 100 most recent. —Cryptic 14:30, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Regarding the first, some writers of scripts advise the use of backlinks. For example, see User:Anomie/previewtemplatelastmod.js or User:Evad37/XFDcloser. The backlink is the wikilink that follows the ; // characters, and it allows usage to be checked using e.g. Special:WhatLinksHere/User:Anomie/previewtemplatelastmod.js or Special:WhatLinksHere/User:Evad37/XFDcloser after which you need to look for only page names that end in ".js" and ignore the others. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:56, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

An insource search always works anyhow - this search in userspace finds that 20 people use the script. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:00, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

That answers my questions. Cryptic, I have forked your query so that I can run it on a later date, it answers my second question. I have added a backlink and the insource search does give me an idea of how many people are importing it right now. :) << FR 18:26, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Idiosyncratic watchlist

I use my watchlist to keep an eye on articles I have written, particularly for detecting vandalism or unsuitable changes to articles. But the watchlist is inconsistent, and does not show me all the entries I would like it to. Today for instance I noticed (by resting the pointer on "diff") that Desert hare had been vandalised, but decided to look at another article on the watchlist before clicking through to Desert hare. By the time I got back to the watchlist, Desert hare was no longer listed there. By this time someone else had dealt with the vandalism, but the article should still have appeared on my watchlist, with a different time tag. Then there are pages like this one which I particularly want to watch, and where I can't rely on the watchlist alerting me to changes, which means that I often miss comments. Is there anything I can do to make the watchlist more suited to my requirements? Cwmhiraeth (talk) 10:10, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

@Cwmhiraeth: in your watchlist do you have any filters enabled, for example - hide probably good edits? Depending on your configuration you may only see WL entries for the "latest" entry - and if you filter it out, it won't show. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:44, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

At Preferences → Watchlist, make sure that "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" is turned on. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:49, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. We'll see how it goes now. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 18:35, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Edit conflicts on talk pages

Could edit conflicts on talk pages ever be reworked? My thought process for this is that after an editor (#1) has posted a comment, and while s/he is going back to edit it, fix typos, etc., another editor (#2) is already writing up their response. Editor #1 saves their fixes, Editor #2 goes to save their brand new reply, and is presented with an edit conflict. Going back to the question, could edit conflicts on talk pages be reworked so that the server could detect that Editor #2 didn't actually have any sort of conflict and just wanted to submit a new reply, and add the reply to where it was meant to go while ignoring Editor #2's changes? -- /Alex/₂₁ 13:18, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Obligatory "structured discussions would solve this problem but en.WP refuses to use them". (Not without some decent reasons, mind you.) --Izno (talk) 13:55, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Obligatory trout to the face for Izno for bringing up Flow... — xaosflux ^Talk 20:34, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

This is probably a good idea in principle. I'm just worried about the case where Editor #2 posts information that would make Editor #1 change their reply, which would result in Editor #1 having to go back and make edits. For my part, in an upcoming reply-link change I'm going to display a little popup saying something like "An editor has made another comment here since you started writing [click here to reload]" if something like that is detected. Enterprisey (talk!) 21:54, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Tabular data not available

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T214179
Resolved

I'm investigating an error at California's 5th congressional district#2012. This is the wikitext and the error:

{{election box US auto|California|2012|United States Representative District 5|Mike Thompson link=Mike Thompson (California politician)}}
Lua error in Module:Election_box_US_auto at line 159:
Unable to find tabular data:
California Elections/2012/General/Candidates.tab.

The above calls Module:Election box US auto which executes the equivalent of:

tab_name = 'California Elections/2012/General/Candidates.tab'
tabular = mw.ext.data.get(tab_name)

The result in tabular is false instead of a table, and that gives the error above. The result should be the Lua equivalent of c:Data:California Elections/2012/General/Candidates.tab.

In a sandbox at Commons, previewing the following shows a table of valid data, as it should:

{{Data:California Elections/2012/General/Candidates.tab}}

I've done some sandbox testing that shows mw.ext.data.get('California Elections/2012/General/Candidates.tab') works at Commons but fails an enwiki. Any ideas? Johnuniq (talk) 02:09, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Using what links here lead me to User:Legoktm/test (ping Legoktm). That is currently working but editing the page and previewing shows errors. There is a presumably temporary breakage that I suppose should be reported at phab somewhere. Johnuniq (talk) 02:26, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

This is phab:T214179. — JJMC89 (T·C) 03:10, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Magic, thanks. Basing articles on Wikidata and/or Commons tabular data has drawbacks. I wonder what appears in an enwiki watchlist if a Commons table is vandalized. Johnuniq (talk) 06:15, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Staunton Mall

Can someone figure out why the map isn't working properly in the infobox for Staunton Mall? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 04:11, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

@TenPoundHammer: How should it appear/work? --DannyS712 (talk) 04:14, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

@DannyS712: It should show a map. I'm just seeing a blank space where it should be. Actually all such maps appear to be malfunctioning right now. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 04:17, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

@TenPoundHammer: I'm seeing a fully working map, and not just on that page. Maybe its a problem on your end? --DannyS712 (talk) 04:19, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Seems to work for me as well. --Palosirkka (talk) 08:52, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Transclusion links

What is the "hide transclusions" button supposed to do on the Special:WhatLinksHere page? I assumed it would hide links transcluded on to the target page through templates, but that's not working for me. SpinningSpark 12:08, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

It only hides pages where the whole page itself is transcluded. It's only useful on templates and other pages used for transclusion. User:PrimeHunter/Source links.js may help with what you want. It's a frequently requested feature. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 155#What Links Here vs.Templates has links to other requests here and at Phabricator. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:36, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: that's great. The only thing that that isn't doing for me is finding links that come in via a redirect. It's not even finding the redirect page. But it's a great help, so often what links here is swamped by navbox entries making it useless. SpinningSpark 15:10, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Logged in here, when I go to other sites I'm logged out

It happened at Wikisource a few days ago, just now at Wikimedia. Doug Weller talk 19:56, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

I think that can happen if you have some software that causes your browser to accept cookies from some sites but not others. Johnuniq (talk) 21:17, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: By Wikimedia, do you mean commons:, meta:, foundation: or another site? Wikimedia is the name of the organisation that hosts all of these Wikis - several hundred altogether. Most of these are part of the single unified login (SUL) system, but some (such as foundation) are not.

When you visit one of the non-SUL Wikis, you won't be logged in unless you log in there as a separate operation. There's nothing we can do to change that except file a phab: ticket.

When you visit one of the SUL Wikis and you are not shown as logged in, try a WP:BYPASS and see if that fixes it. If not, there is a possibility that you have a corrupt cookie. To fix this, go to a site where you are definitely logged in; then deliberately log out; then log in again. Logging out will invalidate all cookies that bear your login name; logging in will create a fresh cookie. When visiting other sites for the first time after logging in again, this fresh cookie may still need the bypass technique. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:41, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64: sorry, meta, to be exact meta:Stewards/Elections_2019. Wikisource a few days ago, meta today. It doesn't help that I use my iPad and my PC at times during the day so I can't recall which I was using at Wikisource, definitely my iPad earlier today. Thanks Doug Weller talk 22:02, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

RSU Afc Button

Hi. Has the Random submission button for AFC go away? If it did where can I find another one? It's the one by Flooded with them Hundreds. --Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 21:53, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Thegooduser, FWTH retired and requested that all their userspace pages be deleted. Special:RandomInCategory/Pending AfC submissions should do what you want though. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:09, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: Given that you're not the only one who uses that script, I'm going to see if I can refund it into my userspace. --DannyS712 (talk) 22:10, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, meant to ping @Thegooduser: --DannyS712 (talk) 22:10, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

I'll ~~restore the page~~ ask that it be restored. Primefac (talk) 22:21, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

@Primefac: I already did - I'm asking for all of his scripts. Also, you restored the documentation page, but not the actual script itself... --DannyS712 (talk) 22:26, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict)There was only one revision and it was simple, so I've just copied it here:

$.when( mw.loader.using('mediawiki.util'), $.ready ).then( function() {
    mw.util.addPortletLink( 'p-views', '/wiki/Special:RandomInCategory/Pending_AfC_submissions', 'RSu', '', 'Go to random draft submission', 'l');
})

~ Amory (u • t • c) 22:30, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

@Amorymeltzer: Thanks. I've also requested that the scripts they wrote be resuscitated. Would you be willing to help? See Wikipedia:Interface administrators' noticeboard#Undeletion of FWTH's user scripts. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 22:32, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Done. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 22:48, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 02:29, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

ProveIt issue

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T214273

I have not been able to use ProveIt at all for the last 12 hours or so. This is because while it usually allows me to, for instance, add new references by entering text into the appropriate fields in the ProveIt sidebar, recently this has become impossible, because clicking on the "Add" tab on the top (which normally creates a new blank citation to fill in) now does nothing at all. Another odd problem is that when I click on the "list" tab on a page that does have fully formatted references, it lists the references, but when I then click on one of the references themselves, it always has "no template" selected in the "main template" menu, and there are never any other options to select, regardless of which citation template is actually being used. I have never seen this happen in >5 years of using ProveIt and I hope it can be fixed soon. IntoThinAir (talk) 15:19, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

This has been reported at phab:T214273 - Evad37 [talk] 03:50, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Improving the ease of listening to audio (especially MIDI files)

(Sorry if this is misplaced. I figure this is mostly technical.) The most common method of including audio (at least in articles on music theory) seems to be Template:Audio. See Interval (music) (and many of the pages linked from it) for examples in the wild. Here's an example of the template's output: Alabama (play^ⓘ). When I click "play" (in Chrome), it navigates to a new page that plays the sound file. I think it would be nicer if clicking it played the file without navigating to a new page, but it's not a terrible experience.

However, if I use the Audio template with a MIDI file, it is pretty terrible. Example: Play^ⓘ. In Chrome and Firefox, this opens a prompt to download the .mid file to my machine. From there, I can use some program to play it (if I'm lucky enough to have the appropriate software and plugins).

There does exist another template, Template:Listen which creates a widget that lets me play the audio without leaving the page. It doesn't work with MIDI files, but Template:Synthlisten is a variant that does.

I'd like to discuss a few potential improvements to the current state.

1. Modify {{Audio}} to act as an inline player

i.e. make it a miniature version of {{Listen}}. Ideally one that transparently works with MIDI in addition to ogg/flac/wav. I could imagine the appearance remaining basically the same, but with the 'Play' link acting as a button (which would perhaps change into a "Pause" button while the audio is playing).

This seems like the nicest solution to me. But I also realize it's a big feature request with significant implications. This has been discussed a few times. These proposals never seemed to catch much momentum, but nor were they dismissed as impossible:

2. Replace instances of {{Audio}} with {{Listen}}/{{Synthlisten}}, where appropriate.

There are some details that make this tricky.

If you look, for example, at Interval (music), you'll see that most instances of {{Audio}} occur in image captions. There is no obvious way to insert a {{Listen}} widget inside an image caption, or generally to combine {{Listen}} and an image into one figure. You can see a variety of methods I've experimented with at User:Dindon~enwiki/Listen_Plus_Image_Experiments. None of the approaches give flawless results. Tables seem to give the best layout, but it feels like a hack? Would be interested to get feedback on these approaches, or any others I may have missed.

(Specifically for cases where the image is of some unannotated sheet music, Score may also be a good replacement, although the translation would require some effort and expertise.)

Another issue is the existence of places where size considerations preclude the possibility of replacing {{Audio}} with {{Synthlisten}}, for example the table in Interval_(music)#Main_intervals. Unlike {{Listen}}, {{Synthlisten}} has a progress slider which makes it unavoidably very wide (see the first example at User:Dindon~enwiki/Listen_Plus_Image_Experiments where the widget overflows the box meant to contain the image caption). It would be helpful to at least have an optional parameter to supress the slider, matching {{Listen}}.

3. Document conventions regarding when to use {{Audio}} vs. {{Listen}}

Perhaps at Help:Creation_and_usage_of_media_files#Audio and on the respective template doc pages.

My impression is that {{Audio}} is appropriate when inlining some audio in the main text, or in very space-constrained contexts (e.g. the caption labelled "Augmented and diminished intervals on C" here, which contains links to 14 audio files). I can't think of any other scenarios where I wouldn't prefer {{Listen}}, but I may be missing something.

I found the following quote at Template_talk:Audio/Archive_1#The_other_audio_template which supports this interpretation:

I think it goes without saying that the listen template is better for everything except inlined text (for which it was never desinged) - it's cleaner, better looking, and more intuitive.

Dindon~enwiki (talk) 02:15, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Regards MIDI files, I think it would be a good idea for MediaWiki to automatically make an Ogg preview. (It takes about 6.15 seconds to do this to

using ffmpeg on my machine.) We already do something similar for SVG files, and those are even rendered correctly in most browsers. Eman 235/talk 03:25, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

That's more or less what {{Synthlisten}} already does, using mw:Extension:Score. We would be able to incorporate the feature into {{Audio}} if we could obtain the URL to the generated ogg without creating a player, but I don't know if the extension currently allows it. Nardog (talk) 10:14, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Blocking

Hi all, a general question: When a user is blocked indefinitely, does the system disallow them to create a new account using the same email address? Like, is the email address added to a blacklist or something? Seems like it would be easier to curtail sockpuppetry if the users had to keep signing up for new email accounts. If all they have to do is jump to a new IP and use the same email address that would be a lame flaw in our system. What are the other ways people can create accounts? I know that there's some way for an existing account to create other accounts--when a user is blocked, do we automatically block those other accounts? Wouldn't that be helpful as well in curtailing sockpuppetry? I don't typically go into the user creation logs unless I have a reason to. Thanks and sorry if my questions are weird, I'm just trying to think of better ways to reign in socking. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 18:03, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

As far as I know, the autoblock doesn’t look at email addresses. There’s a simple reason for that: an email address is not required to create an account. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:24, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

New-article edit-notice substitutes plus-characters instead of spaces

This is a flawed usecase:

Click on redlink foo baz bar
Click on "search" link in bulletpoint "You can also search for an existing article to which you can redirect this title"
Click on redlink in "You may create the page "Foo+baz+bar", but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered"
Create and save the page
Oh no! The page name is not "Foo baz bar", it's "Foo+baz+bar"

This has happened to me twice lately. Whatever template is generating the "search" link in step #2 needs to be fixed. jnestorius^(talk) 16:18, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

It seems like {{urlencode: ... }} is redundant in MediaWiki:Newarticletext. I don't know why {{#titleparts: ... }} is necessary either. Nardog (talk) 16:31, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Fixed, also removed titleparts. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:36, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Ping Dinoguy1000 as the person who added that. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:38, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

When I added this code (keeping in mind that I was not the one who originally implemented the search link as an external link), it was necessary to properly handle titles with some special characters - {{PAGENAME}} by itself performs some encoding that broke titles with certain characters; #titleparts unencodes those characters, but broke for certain other titles; and urlencode allowed those other titles to work correctly. However, based on some limited testing I just did, it appears none of these gymnastics are necessary any more. IIRC I never even thought to try using an internal link for the search link at the time either. I suspect the search links in Template:No article text could also be simplified based on this, if anyone wants to investigate further. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{☎ Dinoguy1000} 19:37, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-04

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

Tech News

Some people did not get last week's issue of Tech News. This was because of a problem with MassMessage. If you did not get last week's issue, you can read it on Meta. [1]

Recent changes

The content translation tool can now use version 2 as the default version for users who turned on the beta feature. For example it adds the tracking category Pages with unreviewed translations to translations that might have used machine translations without fixing the problems. This is so others can find them. You can find this category in Special:TrackingCategories on Wikipedias.
https://mediawiki2latex-large.wmflabs.org can now convert collects of up to 800 pages to PDF, EPUB or ODT. Previously this was 200 pages.

Problems

When a template was edited with the visual editor, it would sometimes put all information on one line. This makes it difficult to read for editors who use the wikitext editor. It also makes it more difficult to see what happened in a diff. This problem affected edits made between 8 and 17 January and is now fixed. [2]
MassMessage is used to post a message to many pages. It has not been working reliably. Some messages have not been posted to everyone. [3][4]
Because of a database problem that had to be fixed immediately you could not edit most wikis for a couple of minutes on 17 January (UTC). This has now been fixed. [5]

Changes later this week

You will be able to use template styles in the Module namespace. [6]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 January. It will be on all wikis from 24 January (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:33, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Recent changes to articles

How to incluide changes in categories which are localisted in the main category? Eurohunter (talk) 21:09, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Syntax highlighting and spell checker in Firefox

I noticed that enabling syntax highlighting in (text) edit disables the spell checker in Firefox. Can it be fixed? --MarMi wiki (talk) 00:58, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

There are several syntax highlighters. I guess you refer to the one on a highlighter marker button

, to the left of "Advanced" in some toolbars. It disables spell-checking in Firefox to avoid other problems. See phab:T177509. "Syntax highlighter" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets works with spell checking. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:58, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I will try that version now. It looks like it's less graphical. --MarMi wiki (talk) 21:22, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

TemplateData not working for Template:Infobox video game

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T213953
Resolved

I tried to add {{Infobox video game}} using the VisualEditor but it displays neither the description nor the fields (tried two different browsers and accounts). As far as I can tell, Template:Infobox video game/doc which contains the TemplateData for this template has not been changed recently and when I try to edit the TemplateData there, all fields appear. I tried to append the whole TD block to the sandbox version and use that version but while I can edit the TD, it also won't appear when trying to add the template with the VE. Can someone help? Regards So Why 14:46, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

It doesn't work for me either. Assuming it's working correctly, it doesn't refreshed template yet (Help:TemplateData#Limitations_and_questions), and you can't null-edit the template because it's protected. --MarMi wiki (talk) 23:55, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Possibly related to phab:T213953, since null-editing the template didn't fix it. - Evad37 [talk] 07:54, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

@SoWhy: The bug has been resolved, so it should be working now - Evad37 [talk] 05:38, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes, works again. Thanks for the ping! Regards So Why 08:10, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

PorkchopGMX

Hi, on my watchlist I saw this, "(Deletion log); 01:16 PorkchopGMX (talk | contribs) deleted redirect User:PorkchopGMX/Wait until the user edits by overwriting ‎(G6: Deleted to make way for move)" But how is this possible, PorkchopGMX is not an admin. Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 01:21, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

I’m pretty sure that it happens automatically when you move a page. In this case, i moved the page to an existing redirect that was in turn created from moving the same page before. The redirect was automatically deleted, so that the new version could be in place of it. PorkchopGMX (talk with me - what i've done) 01:25, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Ah. Thanks. Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 01:27, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

This is Wikipedia:Moving a page#Moving over a redirect. Non-admins can only do it when the only edit in the page history is a redirect to the source of the move. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:41, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes, that is correct. It's only in the last two years or so (since 1 December 2016 I think) that these deletions have been logged, but they have been occurring silently for many more years. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:46, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

User name can start with an asterisk

I used a template on User talk:*ptrs4all* which didn't work as intended. I suppose it's not too serious, but it looks strange and there could be other problems. — Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:36, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

It's an example of the known issue at Help:Template#Problems and workarounds. I have fixed Wikipedia:Teahouse/Teahouse talkback by inserting nowiki before the username.[7] Many other templates still fail on usernames starting with an asterisk. {{Encodefirst}} can also be used in fixes. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:11, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

One that definitely works as expected (by taking the star as-is and not as the first item of a bulleted list) is {{user}}, which I used successfully in this edit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:37, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

How many user names, globally, start with an asterisk? How many of those are active? Maybe its worth raising a ticket to prevent the creation of new accounts using an asterisk at the start of the name; and also maybe forcing a rename of existing accounts? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:14, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

There are quite a few of them - several thousand from this decade alone - but I don't know how many are active (list). —DoRD (talk) 12:44, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

New usernames starting with an asterisk could be prevented in Wikimedia wikis in meta:Title blacklist. I once made a similar suggestion for equals sign but it was declined at meta:Talk:Title blacklist/Archives/2015#Equals sign. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:27, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

HELP - Code for time variation

HELP - Need-To-Know, if possible, any Code to present the variation in the time duration of a day on the planet Saturn - variation to present => "+1m52s/-1m19s" - OR - "+112s/-79s" - in order that the final presentation looks like => https://cdn.iopscience.com/images/0004-637X/871/1/1/apjaaf798ieqn1.gif - from the following reference => < ref name="APJ-20190117">Mankovich, Christopher; et al. (17 January 2019). "Cassini Ring Seismology as a Probe of Saturn's Interior. I. Rigid Rotation". The Astrophysical Journal. 871 (1). Retrieved 18 January 2019.</ref> - Related material, so far, is the following => 10^h 33^m 38^s ( - from {{RA|10|33|38}} )
10 hours,33 minutes,38 seconds (+1m52s;-1m19s)^[1]^[2] - iac - TIA - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 21:35, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

References

^ Mankovich, Christopher; et al. (17 January 2019). "Cassini Ring Seismology as a Probe of Saturn's Interior. I. Rigid Rotation". The Astrophysical Journal. 871 (1). Retrieved 18 January 2019.
^ McCartney, Gretchen; Wendel, JoAnna (18 January 2019). "Scientists Finally Know What Time It Is on Saturn". NASA. Retrieved 18 January 2019.

{{val}} can use uncertainties like that but it cannot handle h/m/s units:

{{val|1234|+56|-78|sortable=off}} → 1234+56
−78

Special:ExpandTemplates shows the following output:

<span class="nowrap">1234<span style="margin-left:0.3em;"><span style="display:inline-block;margin-bottom:-0.3em;vertical-align:-0.4em;line-height:1.2em;font-size:85%;text-align:right;">+56<br />−78</span></span></span>

If desperate, you might try replacing the numbers in the output wikitext with what is needed for the h/m/s superscripts. Johnuniq (talk) 22:13, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: Thank you *very much* for your reply - seems worth considering - and better than my own less worthy tries - Thanks again - it's *greatly* appreciated - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 22:23, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: BRIEF Followup: Yes - seems your suggested code:

<span class="nowrap">10<sup>h</sup>33<sup>m</sup>38<sup>s</sup><span style="margin-left:0.3em;"><span style="display:inline-block;margin-bottom:-0.3em;vertical-align:-0.4em;line-height:1.2em;font-size:85%;text-align:right;">+1<sup>m</sup>52<sup>s</sup><br />-1<sup>m</sup>19<sup>s</sup></span></span></span>

works very well, as follows => 10^h33^m38^s+1^m52^s
-1^m19^s

ALSO - the following code (per User:Kwamikagami from the Saturn article) =>{{RA|10|33|38}} {{+-|{{RA|0|1|52}}|{{RA|0|1|19s}}}} gives the following output => 10^h 33^m 38^s ^{+0^h 1^m 52^s}
_{−0^h 1^m 19s^s}

hope this helps in some way - iac - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 15:11, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

I was trying to code it to leave out the "0^h ", but couldn't figure out how.

BTW, one of the nice things about the {{val}} and {{+-}} templates is that they use proper minus signs instead of hyphens, so we don't have to remember to do so and no-one needs to clean them up. — kwami (talk) 23:14, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Well, that was an easy fix! Hrs now optional in the RA template. — kwami (talk) 23:38, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: Thank you for your help with this coding - yes - agreed - update seems to work very well - and is appreciated => <span class="nowrap">{{RA|10|33|38}} {{+-|{{RA||1|52}}|{{RA||1|19}}}} </span> gives the following output => 10^h 33^m 38^s ^{+ 1^m 52^s}
_{− 1^m 19^s} - Thanks again - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 23:51, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Misspelled namespace in the search interface ("Educaton")

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T214456
Resolved

I'd fix it but I wouldn't know where to find the source text. Upon a search, choose Add namespaces... and you'll find in the dropdown list "Educaton Program talk".--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:39, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

@Fuhghettaboutit: we need a developer to fix that one, I've opened phab:T214456. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:59, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Just FYI...Education_Extension_scheduled_shutdown, Wikimedia outreach ...-...Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Archive 18#NOTICE:_EducationProgram extension is being deprecated....--Moxy (talk) 05:04, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
Fixed — xaosflux ^Talk 12:13, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks all!--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:02, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Searches for certain numbers return nonsense results

I was searching for an obscure computer model number ("3838") and noticed that the results included several seemingly spurious hits on celebrities, such as Victor Garber:

Victor Garber

BNE: XX4827335 BNF: cb14555225q (data) GND: 1061811514 ISNI: 0000 0001 1477 3838 LCCN: n85322430 MusicBrainz: 0e8d3431-e40c-4ddc-93c0-db67a0cd16a5 SNAC: w6h99bnn

I tried a couple of other four-digit numbers, which picked up similar results ("4242" and Gemma Arterton, as another example).

There's no such text visible in the article source, so it appears that article metadata that is normally hidden is getting erroneously(?) indexed by the search engine. (Or is this considered a feature?)--NapoliRoma (talk) 16:31, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

That text is from the {{authority control}} template; it appears at the bottom of the Victor Garber page, under the navbox. The numbers themselves come from Wikidata, so they wouldn't be in the source on enwiki. Whether that's a bug or a feature is left as an exercise to the reader; Help:Authority control says that it's a way of associating a unique identifier to articles on Wikipedia, and that number is part of Garber's International Standard Name Identifier, so it might be intentional for such ids to be used in search criteria. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 16:39, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

It's hidden in the mobile version. You should see it in the desktop version. By default, the rendered desktop page is searched. {{authority control}} is an English Wikipedia template which outputs text in the rendered page just like navboxes and various other templates. Prefix the search with insource: if you only want hits in the source text: insource:3838. In this and many other examples it gives more results, e.g. when 3838 is part of a url with link text. 3838 insource:3838 finds pages where it's both in the source and rendered page. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:32, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

@NapoliRoma: To narrow search results, add word computer to the search: 3838 computer. --MarMi wiki (talk) 19:56, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Infobox medical condition (new)

Example: infobox of Brain tumor. "Specialty Lua error: bad argument #1 to 'find' (string expected, got nil).", but specialty is well specified here. This error is now apparently affecting all pages that use {{subst:Infobox medical condition (new)}}, no matter if "specialty" is specified in wikidata. Materialscientist (talk) 00:38, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm also seeing it on pages with {{Infobox video game}}. Seems to be a relation. What's going on? funplussmart (talk) 00:49, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

The problem has disappeared. Materialscientist (talk) 01:57, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

That was vandalism at Module:Complex date reported at WP:AN. Johnuniq (talk) 02:49, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Amazing template switch

Many articles were in Category:Pages with script errors and I fixed a recent edit at {{College}} that was responsible. That is a very interesting template and in the spirit of sharing, I offer these puzzles (the first prize for a correct explanation of these outputs is a free post at User talk:Jimbo Wales and the second prize is two free posts):

{{College|Adams State}} → Adams State
{{College|==A==}} → Error: Template:College requires a value
{{College|1===A==}} → ==A==
{{College|:}} → Error: Template:College requires a value
{{College|}} → Error: Template:College requires a value
{{College|Alabama State}} → Alabama State

It is amazing how well that template works given the enormous switch. If I have to pose a question, I suppose it would be to ask if all the colons and the pipes before most of them should be removed. Johnuniq (talk) 10:06, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

That is certainly an unusual template. The only parts which are transcluded (between includeonly tags) is

{{#switch:{{{1|}}}||:| = | #default = {{{1}}} }}

but it is obviously using the other code somehow ... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:22, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

All code except <noinclude>...</noinclude> is transcluded. That means nearly all code is trancluded on that page. It uses some unusual code to render nicely on the template page so it becomes easier to edit. Most examples by Johnuniq are side effects of this unusual code. For example, colons are used to give indentation on the template page but causes a colon in the call to produce a match the first time for Adams State. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:45, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Wow, I didn't understand that reason for the colons. Very innovative use of wikitext. Johnuniq (talk) 02:53, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

I'll take a crack at it. The parser (mostly) ignores the newlines in the switch statement, so, reorganizing it into one line of:

| match [|match [|match ...]] = result

for each possible result, the parser sees:

{{#switch:{{{1|}}}
 | ==A== | Adams State College | Adams State | : = [[Adams State University|Adams State]]
 | Adamson University | AdU | Adamson | : = [[Adamson University|Adamson]]
 | United ... | AFA | : = [[United States Air Force Academy|Air Force]]
 | | University of Alabama | Alabama | : = [[University of Alabama|Alabama]]
 ...
 | Youngstown ... | : = [[Youngstown State University|Youngstown State]] 
 | : | = | #default = {{{1}}}
}}

The first call correctly matches Adams.
I think the second call, with parm 1 set to ==A==, ends up passing an empty value because of the leading =. See #5 for why this yields Alabama.
In the third call, a value of 1===A== passes ==A== as parm 1, which matches the first case of the first result, yielding Adams State.
The fourth call, with param 1 set to :, matches the fourth case of the first result (the : between the | and the =, again yielding Adams.
The fifth call, with param 1 set to nothing, matches the first case of the third result (the in the | |), yielding Alabama. This is because, in the template code, the result above it (Air Force) is the first one to have a trailing | after it. It seems these trailing pipes should be removed to avoid matching an empty param so it can be trapped as an error.

The last case in the code doesn't need the : match, since that would have happened up in the first case. I think the = case should be trapped as an error (along with ).

—[AlanM1(talk)]— 13:22, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

This template is a hairball, and I always dread seeing edit requests for it. I think we can make it better. The best thing would probably be some sort of Lua module with a data file, but pending that, I have created Template:College/testcases and Template:College/sandbox. The sandbox needs a lot more work, and many more testcases and error checks are needed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:58, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

I left a comment on the talk page about how I really don't see a need for the template at all. All it's doing is linking things, and we have a long history of deleting those kinds of templates at TFD. --Izno (talk) 15:45, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

It was nominated and kept at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 October 30#Template:College after your talk page comment. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:25, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, and I commented in the TFD too. Sigh. --Izno (talk) 19:25, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Sandbox changes to Template:College

I have created and modified the sandbox. Here are the test cases from above, plus one more:

{{College/sandbox|Adams State}} → Adams State
{{College/sandbox|==A==}} → Error: Template:College requires a value
{{College/sandbox|1===A==}} → ==A==
{{College/sandbox|:}} → Error: Template:College requires a value
{{College/sandbox|}} → Error: Template:College requires a value
{{College/sandbox|Alabama State}} → Alabama State
{{College/sandbox|Foo State}} → Foo State

In the sandbox version, Category:Pages using Template:College with unsupported name is added to pages with a blank value or a value that is not supported by the template. Values not supported by the template are rendered as submitted to the template (e.g. Foo State). You can see more examples at Template:College/testcases. Feedback is welcome. We should probably move this discussion to Template talk:College. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:44, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

API: Interacting with JSON pages

Help request: When using the api to retrieve the content of a page, it usually returns in the form of a long string with escape characters, etc. For pages that are in the JSON content format already (eg Wikipedia:Geonotice/list.json) is there any way to have the api return the content as json? --DannyS712 (talk) 03:11, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

DannyS712, In PHP at least, this works:

<?php
$api = unserialize( file_get_contents( "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvlimit=1&rvprop=content&format=php&titles=Wikipedia:Geonotice/list.json" ) );
$json = $api['query']['pages'][58816915]['revisions'][0]['*'];
print_r( json_decode( $json, TRUE ) );
?>

It returns:

Results SQL ^{Query me!} 03:27, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure what language you're using, but serializing at least gives me the page content without decoding everything. SQL ^{Query me!} 03:27, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

@SQL: I've been using javascript. I'd rather try to avoid learning a new language just to figure this out, but thanks for the help. If noone else can help, I might just have to learn PHP --DannyS712 (talk) 03:31, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

You could also get the raw page content using ?action=raw, and parse that into JSON. E.g. with Javascript/jQuery:

$.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Geonotice/list.json&action=raw')
.then(function(response) { return JSON.parse(response); })
.then(function(result) { console.log(result); });

- Evad37 [talk] 03:35, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Evad37, Heh, forgot about that - that works perfectly as well! SQL ^{Query me!} 03:39, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

@Evad37: Thanks. JSON.parse was the answer I needed. But, I thought I read somewhere that index.php is being depreciated? --DannyS712 (talk) 03:44, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

@Evad37: Thank you so much. The JSON.parse was what I needed. See User:DannyS712 test/get JSON.js for a proof-of-concept script that logs the selected page's json content. --DannyS712 (talk) 04:07, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

"established_date" not working in "Infobox settlement" template

Hi there. I'm not sure why this edit didn't work. I tried it myself as a preview and the established date didn't appear in the infobox. Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 22:46, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

fixed --Lam-ang (talk) 23:14, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Diff between the original edit and the fix. established_date is only shown if established_title is present. There is no default value. The documentation of {{Infobox settlement}} should probably say this. It's mentioned at Template talk:Infobox settlement#No defaults? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:29, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Ah. Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 10:14, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

"Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" does not recognize HotCat generated summaries

The title says it all. If I use HotCat to add multiple categories, I will get a warning that no edit summary has been entered despite HotCat filling in a summary. I have to manually edit that summary (by adding a space usually) for the check to no longer flag the comment. Before I fill a bug report, I'd like to make sure it's not just me, so can someone else reproduce this? Regards So Why 09:04, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

I reproduced it. You may wish to read phab:T10912 too, which is related. –Ammarpad (talk) 12:58, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Lowercase sigmabot help

Due to an username change, I needed to reconfigure Lowercase sigmabot III's settings. However, in process of doing so, sigmabot forgot that I had archive 2 back when Miszabot was archiving it and archived some of 2018 Signposts to archive 1. Is there any help to prevent this from happening again? FMecha (to talk|to see log) 12:34, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Fixed with counter = 2.[8] PrimeHunter (talk) 12:48, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

@FMecha: Lowercase sigmabot didn't "forget" - you told it to go back to the first archive, when in this edit you removed |counter=2 and replaced it with |counter=1. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:22, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

flaggedrevs-color-1 in watchlist page history?

For a short while (possibly just one page load?), every entry in my watchlist had a pale blue background. Disabling:

.flaggedrevs-color-1 {
    background-color: #eaf3ff;
}

in the Chrome DOM explorer turned it off. I'm no longer seeing that when I look at my watchlist again. Was there some change that was quickly rolled back, or just a random transient failure of some CSS file to load? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:45, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

PS, I'm sorry, not the watchlist. Page history, but only for a specific page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kip_McKean&action=history I'm still seeing it. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:48, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

@RoySmith: The page Kip McKean is under pending changes. In its history, all edits that have been accepted are given a pale blue background; if there were any that were awaiting review, they would have a brownish-yellow background like this. To see more examples, have a look at the page history of any article listed here. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:29, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Why does advanced search make searching namespaces harder rather than easier?

On the search tab of preferences:

"Don’t show the Advanced Search interface.
Advanced Search adds a form to the Special:Search page. This allows you to perform specialized searches, even if you don't know any search syntax. It also changes the way namespaces can be selected.

Yeah, Advanced Search makes it more difficult to search templates for example. -- Timeshifter (talk) 14:22, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Give an example why it's harder.

Earlier to search by namespace you needed to press enter in search box, click advanced search and then finally select namespace. Now it's shortened by 1 step. I don't like that it places cursor always in search, making browsing longer results by keyboard annoying (when you visit one result and then go back again to results page). --MarMi wiki (talk) 23:45, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

See Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. Check the box for "Open search results in a new tab or window when holding down the Ctrl key". It is not perfect, but it nearly always works. -- Timeshifter (talk) 10:34, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, but that doesn't solve my problem.

What I meant by "cursor always in search" (I'm assuming the option was for that): search for something that gives couple of pages of result (increase number of results [or change screen resolution to smaller vertical size] per page if you can see all page), go one/two pages down by pressing Page Down, select one of the links, when page loads go back to search results (Alt+cursor left) (you should return to the same screen position on the results list), press up/down/Page Down key - cursor (focus) is in the search box, so you end up at the top of the page. --MarMi wiki (talk) 21:29, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

MarMi wiki. I see what you are saying. My idea gets around it though by not loading a new page on top of the search results list. So your place in the list (via page down) is exactly where you left it. You use ctrl-click on each search result. Each one opens in a new tab. -- Timeshifter (talk) 18:25, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

I guess that will work (equal number of steps needed). But I'm used to open results in one tab. --MarMi wiki (talk) 19:31, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Example: Click on the search form icon to get to the search page. Click on "add namespaces". Uncheck "article". Scroll down to template. Check "template". Enter search terms. Click "search." That is more steps than before.

And worse, it is not as intuitive. The old search had all the namespace checkboxes in a very compact square. No need to scroll.

And now if you hit the wrong scroll button you lose the namespaces list. -- Timeshifter (talk) 10:34, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Personally, I agree with you that the old list of checkboxes was more usable than the current dropdown list widget. You'd have to ask the people responsible for the redesign to know why they think this is better; you might file a task in the Phabricator project for the advanced search to ask them more directly, or figure out who the right people are and ping them. Anomie ⚔ 15:28, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Specifically, the old array of check boxes was also easier to access: just move the cursor to the box. With this scrolling arrangement (and why do people think scrolling is so neat it should be unnecessarily added?) you have to scan a list going by in quasi-random order. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:03, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. That link should be on the advanced search form, so people can see what has already been requested. I see you are a developer. Could you write up a task? I don't have much luck in writing tasks that get a favorable response. :) -- Timeshifter (talk) 16:21, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Not something I'd do in my professional capacity, and in my personal capacity I don't really have time. Sorry. Anomie ⚔ 01:20, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Special:Search links to Help:Searching on "Help" in the English Wikipedia. If we want a link to phab:tag/advanced-search/ then it should be on the help page and not the search form itself. Advanced search is enabled by default but few readers will be interested in the phab page. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:15, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

PrimeHunter. One developer told me this recently about the link "Tell us what you think about the filtering tools" on the English Wikipedia and Commons watchlist page:

We don't plan to remove that link. We still need it to have a way to be aware of bugs. If someone wants to suggest a change or an improvement, we will look at it but it may be implemented later. Have a like like that is done on more and more tools because of the reason you mention: people won't come to Phabricator or elsewhere because they aren't aware of it.

So maybe there could be a similar link on the advanced search page. Rather than bury it on the help page. -- Timeshifter (talk) 18:12, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

@Timeshifter: Do you know that you can type in the name of the namespace (after clicking Add namespaces that space turns into search box with autocompletion)? --MarMi wiki (talk) 21:33, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

MarMi wiki. No, I did not know that. Thanks. It is kind of buggy though. A space entered in after typing in "template" causes the list to shrink down to just the checkbox for template talk. And I if I type in 2 namespaces in that form, with a space between them, I get nothing. I sometimes want to search in multiple namespaces quickly. The old set of checkboxes in a compact space was so easy, fast, and intuitive. -- Timeshifter (talk) 18:12, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

If you know names of namespaces then two letters should be enough to find them - ex. Talk and Template: ta -> click on Talk (or choose by cursor down+enter), te -> click on Template. It's quick too (if you don't need to select more than ~4). But expanding list (like for Advanced parameters) of all namespaces would be nice too.

By the way, you can scroll the namespace list by using mouse scroll wheel, it's more convenient. Too bad you cant do that from keyboard by PgDn/PgUp. --MarMi wiki (talk) 19:31, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Could someone who knows about UTRS please reply to request at User talk:War Operation Plan Response?

See above. This user claims UTRS does not work for them and produces an error. Regards So Why 13:51, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

@SoWhy: UTRS issues can be reported to: utrs-admins

googlegroups.com (I'm not somewhere I can email them right now). — xaosflux ^Talk 14:05, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll tell them! Regards So Why 15:02, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Doesn't work for me either (I was just caugnt up in unblock collateral) ^{[Username Needed]} 15:21, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
UTRS errors can also be reported here. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:41, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Why am I seeing everything right justified here?

Suddenly all the pages I view here on the English Wikipedia are right justified - articles, talk pages, contributions, watch list (makes the watch list look quite strange). Pages at the French and German Wikipedias are appearing normally, as are those at Wikidata and Commons. Has something happened here? I haven't make any recent changes to my preferences. StarryGrandma (talk) 04:00, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

@StarryGrandma: if you look at this page in safemode is it still wrongly justified? — xaosflux ^Talk 04:05, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

In safemode it is back to normal. StarryGrandma (talk) 04:23, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

How about in force English mode? — xaosflux ^Talk 04:25, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Still right-justified in "force English". StarryGrandma (talk) 04:32, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

@StarryGrandma: try blanking out your User:StarryGrandma/common.js and User:StarryGrandma/common.css files. Also are you using a desktop or mobile? What skin are you using? — xaosflux ^Talk 04:48, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into this Xaosflux. Blanked them, logged out, rebooted computer, and still seeing this all right-justified. I'm using the Vector skin in desktop mode with browser Firefox 64.0.2 (64-bit). I still have my Twinkle and AfC menus active even with css and js pages blank. But many people have those and I seem to be the only one with this problem. StarryGrandma (talk) 05:12, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Xaosflux, somehow "justify paragraphs" was set in my user preferences, I didn't even know there was such a thing. Perhaps I clicked it earlier by accident and it has only just started affecting watchlists. Thanks for all your help. StarryGrandma (talk) 05:29, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

StarryGrandma, I know why because the same thing happened to me a few days ago. There was a bug in OOUI that let your mouse clicks pass through the save button in your preferences and toggle the checkboxes behind it. You were probably trying to click "Save", and it didn't work because you had toggled the checkbox next to "Justify paragraphs" with that click. This bug has been reported to the developers and they're currently fixing it. Enterprisey (talk!) 06:43, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

@Enterprisey: thanks for the note, got the ticket number? — xaosflux ^Talk 12:05, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

phab:T213517 maybe. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:14, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Enterprisey. It's nice to know it wasn't something weird I did. StarryGrandma (talk) 22:23, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Draft proposal: Script modules

Could javascript-savy users please review my draft proposal for script modules – bits of Javascript code intended to be easily reused by userscripts – and leave feedback on its talk page? Cheers, Evad37 [talk] 03:01, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Replacing template programming element

I am currently dealing with the errors that are listed in this page. I would like to know how I can replace the previous and next seasons present in the infobox of the article 1996–97 ISL season. I tried to replace it with |previous= and |next= but it didn't work.Adithyak1997 (talk) 06:42, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

You can only use parameters which are known to a template, in this case the general {{Infobox}} which has no previous and next parameters. You could convert the whole template call to {{Infobox sports season}} or just use {{Succession links}} like in [9]. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:00, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

GNIS is broken

GNIS is broken, breaking {{cite gnis}} and equivalents as well as the search function. It was working on Monday. Just FYI, probably temporary, but something to watch. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:26, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Update: I emailed an inquiry to the "GNIS Manager". The lengthy autoreply began: "You have reached the GNIS Manager email box. Due to the lapse in appropriations, I am prohibited from conducting work as a Federal employee, including returning phone calls and emails, until further notice." No comment. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:28, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Fixed ―Mandruss ☎ 22:17, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-05

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

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The Wikimedia servers use HHVM to run the PHP code. They are going to use PHP7 and stop using HHVM. You can test PHP7 with a new beta feature. That way you can help find and report problems.

Problems

When someone moves a page to a name that already exists that page that had the name the article is moved to is deleted.^{[clarification needed]} For a couple of months this didn't always work. Some users saw an error message instead. This has now been fixed. [10]

Changes later this week

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18:15, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Ten thousand pages with script errors

now that Module:Italian provinces/data has been deleted by Primefac after a discussion initiated by Pppery, we now have about ten thousand articles in Category:Pages with script errors. I don't know if the solution is to undelete the module or fix some code somewhere, but a large red error at the foot of a thousands articles can't be the best solution. Frietjes (talk) 20:57, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

@MSGJ and Johnuniq: it looks to me that the fix is to undelete Module:Italian provinces/data, since the proposal at tfd was to delete Module:Italian provinces and not the data page. Frietjes (talk) 21:07, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Apologies, I'm usually getting yelled at for not deleting subpages! I've restored the /data module. Primefac (talk) 21:11, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

I did make the point at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2018_October_24#Module:Italian_provinces that it was not a good idea for the submodule to remain at its current location while the parent module is deleted. There must be somewhere better for it. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:52, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

@MSGJ, Primefac, and Frietjes: See Wikipedia talk:Lua/Archive 8#Requested move 28 January 2019. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 23:01, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

The article script errors have gone. Presumably the ugly red error ("Lua error in Module:Data at line 7: attempt to index local 'data' (a nil value)") at {{ProvinciaIT}} + {{ProvinciaIT/alpha-sort form}} + {{ProvinciaIT/coat of arms}} + {{ProvinciaIT/region code}} + {{ProvinciaIT/short form}} + {{ProvinciaIT/unlinked}} will be fixed when someone works out what the point of the TfD was and what happened. Johnuniq (talk) 23:09, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

It is not, in my opinion, necessary to fix script errors caused by a template demoing itself with no parameters when calling it with no parameters in fact produces an error. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 23:11, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

It adds yet more junk to Category:Pages with script errors. A worse problem is that it creates puzzles that waste time for other editors. If someone is investigating any of those templates they see an ugly error that could not be intentional. Puzzling over that wastes time. If you're going to delete stuff for recreation you have to clean up as well. Johnuniq (talk) 01:37, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Use of Ctrl+Y (undo) in source text editor

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T33780

How come Ctrl+Y does not work for edits created by elements of the default 2010 source editor toolbar? Has this problem already been discussed before?--Hildeoc (talk) 12:02, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Hildeoc, I'm not really sure what you are referring to. Please include the behavior that you are seeing, the behavior you expect to see, and how to reproduce the issue as well as the exact editor you are using (2017 Wikitext editor (like the Visual Editor), 2010 wikitext editor (default), 2006 wikitext editor(legacy)). --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:59, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

If the problem is that a single return does not create a line break in rendering then this is deliberate. Make two returns for a new paragraph. Have you enabled wikEd at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets, and is the problem that return works at first in the edit area but sometimes disappear on save or preview? This was reported at Wikipedia:Help desk#Bug when editing - closes up spaces and User talk:Cacycle/wikEd#wikEd bug report: blank lines deleted. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:10, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: First of all thank you very much for posting! Next, I have to honestly apologize, as I've apparently completely mixed things up in my original inquiry – I actually meant Ctrl+Y (undo), and this with respect to edits made with elements of the default 2010 wikitext editor toolbar. Once again, I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience caused by that startling confusion of mine – it's been a long night ...--Hildeoc (talk) 17:44, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

This is also the case with the 2006 wikitext editor. In all "normal" (non-VE) editors, if you click one of the links in the Insert/Wiki markup/etc. block below the edit window, the Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Y functions will reset to a point just after the last use of the tool, so you can't undo the use of that tool. I expect the same applies to the buttons above the editwindow, although I don't use them (they take far too long to load). This resetting of the "earliest you can undo to" thing has been like that for some years now, although before VE was introduced it could undo/redo right back to the start of the editing session. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:19, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Thank you, too! Has this never been discussed at Phab? If yes, why hasn't it been resolved to this day?--Hildeoc (talk) 19:24, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

I have not checked Phab but in general, many things in software have not been resolved because there are always more issues (software bugs or enhancement requests) than people who might(or can) work on them, and different people may have different priorities. --Malyacko (talk) 23:53, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Found the Phab task, there is a patch for review but the previous workaround was reverted due to compatibility issues. TheDJ is a assigned to the ticket, they might have more information. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:33, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

AntiCompositeNumber, Yeah newer browsers provide some options for this, but I need to rework the patch to take care of some side cases indeed. Unfortunately i've been really busy since Christmas, as some might have noticed I haven't event visited this forum very much, let alone did any coding for Wikipedia. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:18, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Hex characters and # in regex searches?

The docs for regex searches using insource:// do not mention \x, normally used to specify characters as hex values. Is there an alternative?

Also, # appears to be special in a regex, but I can't find what it means (when not escaped). Anyone know? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 01:10, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

User:MusikBot/FilterMonitor/Recent changes

This page transcludes onto WP:EFN, and something is causing it to spew HTML formatting text onto the list. Currently showing "Filter 1 — Actions: <span style='color:red; Flags: enabled; Pattern modified". Home Lander (talk) 16:34, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Ping MusikAnimal, some issue with the bot I assume - was <span style='color:red;font-weight:bold'>disallow</span> previously. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:17, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Indeed. This is a known bug that's been there for years... The information you see is correct, just ignore the broken HTML :) I'll try to get this fixed soon. Thanks for the ping — MusikAnimal ^talk 06:44, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Category administrative feature requests, probably

A couple thoughts today:

It would be great for cleaning up certain kinds of vandalism if we could view a history of changes to a category. Not the history of the category itself but the history of pages being added and removed from it. This activity shows up in the watchlist now but it's limited by the watchlist's own limitations (can't go back very far, limited entries, etc.).
Similarly, it would be very useful if administrators could protect a category to block it being added and removed from pages. A very common POV-pushing mode is mass-adding single categories to multiple pages, and currently the only real options for admins are protecting each page being attacked (ineffective because the vandal will just attack different pages) or the usual limitations on blocking the vandal (dynamic IPs, busy ranges, sockpuppetry, and so on).

I'm not really actually sure where to make feature requests so I'll just leave this here. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 12:58, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: for 'category membership history' set the WABAC machine to 2005, we're going to visit phab:T6366! For the second one if there were a specific category getting repeatedly, disruptively, added to articles - we could make an edit filter for it. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:56, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Searching contributions by date appears to have a glitch

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T214997

I was searching someone's contributions for something they posted in 2017. So using the usual method, I did this

Went to their contributions
Clicked on the "From Date" box
Clicked on the up arrow twice, to get to the year. I was presented with years from 2000 to 2015. This is an error, the years should end with the current year.
Tried clicking on the right arrow to get the next years, only to be presented with 2020 to 2035
In other words, the years 2016 to 2019 are missing from the selection box. (The same thing happens with "To Date").

Obviously this isn't a massive issue for most people, because you can just type the dates in. It would be an issue for someone who (for example) uses a mouse and speech software, however. Black Kite (talk) 19:33, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Note: it happens to all the windows. Clicking back one gives me 1980 to 1995 (i.e. 1996 to 1999 are missing).

Edit: it's a browser issue. In Edge and Chrome,it works fine. In Firefox 64.0.2, which is what I'm on, it looks like the window is too small to fit all 20 dates in. Black Kite (talk) 19:37, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

I see the issue in Firefox but only in MonoBook. Your screenshot looks like MonoBook. If you don't have the default skin Vector then please always mention your skin in reports of interface issues. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:59, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

You are right, and it works in Vector. So, just a Monobook issue in Firefox. Worth reporting? Black Kite (talk) 01:10, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

It also happens at other wikis. It sounds worth a phab: report with tags MediaWiki-Special-pages, MonoBook, Browser-Support-Firefox. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:45, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Anyone have an idea how to fix this? Black Kite (talk) 17:32, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

I filed it as phab:T214997 and started looking into it. This is apparently due to size calculations in Firefox being off by half a pixel, pushing the last item in each row to the next row. Matma Rex talk 00:08, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for doing that - it had completely slipped by mind until it just appeared on my watchlist. Black Kite (talk) 00:14, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Archiving of Talk:Opinion polling for the 2017 French presidential election

This talk page seems to be set up for archiving, and there are three exisiting archives of it: Talk:Opinion polling for the French presidential election, 2017/Archive 1, Talk:Opinion polling for the French presidential election, 2017/Archive 2 and Talk:Opinion polling for the French presidential election, 2017/Archive 3. Since the same name is not being for the article talk page and its archive, the archives are not showing up in the {{Talk header}} template. I'm not sure whether different names for the archives were intentionally selected or whether article was WP:MOVED after the archives were created. Is there a simple fix here (perhaps moving the archives to the Talk:Opinion polling for the 2017 French presidential election/Archive 1, etc.) or is something more involved needed? -- Marchjuly (talk) 05:45, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

The archives just need to be moved. I've done so and updated the archive bot configuration. — JJMC89 (T·C) 06:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that. I wasn't sure if anything else besides that needed to be done. -- Marchjuly (talk) 08:17, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Help:Gallery tag

Hi, in Help:Gallery tag#Syntax, why exactly does there occur so much spacing above and below the slideshow example captioned A Yeoman Warder, from a Victorian-era [...] (right above the subsection Extended syntax)? As I've already asked here before, those interested may as well want to look into this thread.--Hildeoc (talk) 22:29, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Hildeoc, because that is the default styling that MediaWiki provides for this type of gallery. 4em margin at top and bottom. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:42, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

That does seem large. Maybe we should mention it can be reduced with <gallery mode=slideshow style="margin-top: 0em; margin-bottom: 0em;>. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:32, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

{{Sisterlinks}} and {{Subject bar}} are not linking correctly

There are many, many instances of this but see (e.g.) Adrianne Wadewitz: the link to s: goes to "Adrianne Wadewitz" rather than "Author:Adrianne Wadewitz", even tho that is called out in the s= parameter. In that same instance, n= is ignored. For an example using {{sisterlinks}}, see the n: link at 2016 Oakland warehouse fire. I have tinkered around with the latter template but can never get it to work somehow. I looked at {{subject bar}} just now and it's just invoking some Lua and I'm totally lost. Can someone make these functional so that I don't have to go to our sister projects and make bad redirects? ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:41, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

See the documentation at Template:Subject bar#Optional parameters:

n: Setting any value for this parameter will result in a link to Wikinews. The default search string is the article name.
n-search: This value replaces the default Wikinews search string.
s: Setting any value for this parameter will result in a link to Wikisource. The default search string is the article name.
s-search: This value replaces the default Wikisource search string. To search by author, start with "Author:".

{{Subject bar|n=y|n-search=Wikimedian activist Adrianne Wadewitz dies|s=y|s-search=Author:Adrianne Wadewitz}} produces:

I think |n=y should be implied when n-search is set, and |s=y should be implied when s-search is set. You currently have to set two parameters to choose another search string than the page name. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:47, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Recaptcha without new links

Maybe it is not important but just in case. I've just made this edit but I had to input a recaptcha text in order to be able to save it. A message said I had added a new link in the text... ¿? Is it a bug or something else? Regards. --188.76.243.175 (talk) 23:34, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Did you get this 'long' message: MediaWiki:Captchahelp-text or this 'short' one: MediaWiki:Captcha-addurl? — xaosflux ^Talk 23:48, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Not totally sure but I'd say the short one. There was surely more text but the short one is the one that rings a bell. --188.76.243.175 (talk) 00:49, 2 February 2019 (UTC) I'm totally sure it was not the long one, though. --188.76.243.175 (talk) 00:55, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Too many expensive parser function calls

List of Federal Roads in Malaysia has 907 expensive parser function calls but no edits for over a year. The problem is that {{JKR}} is given a route number such as 123; it then uses ifexist twice to decide whether to display Image:Jkr-ft123.svg or Image:Jkr-ft123.png or 123. Any thoughts on how that should be fixed? I think I (or someone) fixed a similar problem by removing the ifexist and requiring the editor to write 123 if that is needed. I don't recall dealing with svg/png. Johnuniq (talk) 04:27, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: Suggestion to rewrite the template: instead of having {{JKR|route number|display}} where display is either svg, png, or the default of plain text. It would require a lot of conversion, but with a bot it shouldn't be too hard, and it would save expensive parser functions on all of the pages that use the template. --DannyS712 (talk) 04:34, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

500 expensive parser function calls are allowed. {{JKR}} is used in 942 pages. hastemplate:JKR incategory:"Pages with too many expensive parser function calls" only gives List of Federal Roads in Malaysia which appears to be the only affected article. I guess the idea of using ifexist is that images may be uploaded later so I suggest to keep ifexist except if the caller specifies an optional display. This parameter would only have to be used in one article. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:47, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

{{JKR}} currently uses only parameter 1 which is an identifier such as "123". I'm looking at adding parameter 2 which could be "png" to use the png file without testing if it exists, or "svg" likewise for svg, or "text" to show the identifier in italics such as 123. If parameter 2 is empty or missing, the current behavior would occur. The business part of the template is:

{{#ifexist:Media:Jkr-ft{{{1}}}.svg|[[Image:Jkr-ft{{{1}}}.svg|30px|link=]]|{{#ifexist:Media:Jkr-ft{{{1}}}.png|[[Image:Jkr-ft{{{1}}}.png|30px]]|''{{{1|}}}''}}}}

Should "Media" and "Image" both be replaced with "File"?
The |link= disables the link for an svg file but not a png file (examples: FT 1 and FT 2). I suppose disabling the link is a good idea, but why not do it for png as well?

Johnuniq (talk) 07:01, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Keep "Media". #ifexist:File: tests for a local file page and is false for Commons files. "Image:" is deprecated but still works. "File:" is recommended. Using |link= to omit a file page link is only allowed if the image license requires no attribution. I don't know whether that is an issue for some of the images. The example File:Jkr-ft2.png is public domain so no issue there. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:12, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Since there is only one svg image and the rest are png ([11]), why not just remove the svg part of the template as it's not really needed yet? -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:23, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

A search finds three with the required name pattern: File:Jkr-ft1.svg. File:Jkr-ft2484.svg, File:Jkr-ft3219.svg. The latter two have no png alternative and were uploaded by SNN95 who added the svg code to the template. I wouldn't skip svg. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:41, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Could change the checking order though, to look for png first and then svg. -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:51, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for trying that. The number of expensive calls was greatly reduced but still over 500. Testing for png before svg did not account for the fact that both File:Jkr-ft1.png and File:Jkr-ft1.svg sometimes exist. At any rate, I got tired of the article being in the error tracking category so I did a major edit per my thoughts above. There are now 10 expensive calls and the problem is resolved. Johnuniq (talk) 09:28, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Prevent switching to mobile view

Is there anything I can do to prevent my watchlist from switching to mobile view? I typically open multiple tabs from my watch list to review and edit them. Problem is that when I get back to the watchlist tab, it now consistently auto-refreshes into mobile view. This has only become a noticeable problem in the past few days. Previously this would only happen rarely. This only happens while editing on tablet. older ≠ wiser 10:40, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Layout of blue links and the footnote numbers is messed up during preview of an article in edit mode

I thought I should speak up about the deterioration in rendering the articles, particularly in edit mode. The changes over the past several months are starting to accumulate. I'm running Chrome OS Version 70.0.3538.110 (Official Build) (64-bit) on a vanilla Chromebook. For example during preview of an article in edit mode. Try editing United_States_Army_Futures_Command#AFC_branch_locations, click the blue edit link, and select preview mode. The spacing of black text, blue links and the footnote numbers are running together. This symptom clears up when I post the change, but Layout preview used to work well, years ago. Something has changed. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 21:47, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

But when I try Chrome OS Version 71.0.3578.127 (Official Build) (64-bit), the symptom does not reproduce. 00:25, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

And preview in Chrome OS Version 65.0.3325.209 (Official Build) (64-bit) did not reproduce the symptom. The font size is slightly smaller. 00:36, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

The layout problem is described in the image description.

I restarted Chrome on the 1st unit, now its Version 71.0.3578.94 (Official Build) (64-bit), as it re-rendered, the fonts started to reproduce the symptom. Then it completed its re-paint, and the article looks normal again. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 01:06, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Ancheta Wis, can you make a screenshot ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:06, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the suggestion. When it comes up again, I will post it. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 12:58, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

TheDJ OK, I posted the screenshot. The Chrome OS build is Version 71.0.3578.127 (Official Build) (64-bit). -- 11:41, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm also seeing the crowding on Hypersonic_speed#Classification of Mach regimes -- 12:09, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

It's posted as File:Screenshot_2019-02-02_at_6.26.55_AM.png. The problem does not reproduce on an older Chromebook. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 12:39, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Mysterious hover image

A Stars Spiral (A Stars Spiral.ogv with default thumbnail) DBig Xrayᗙ

(A Stars Spiral.ogv with thumbnail at time=50) DBig Xrayᗙ

When I go to Kuiper belt and hover over "circumstellar disc" in the first sentence, I see a pop-up containing a photographic image sitting on top of the first two sentences of the target article. So far, so good; I find these pop-ups very helpful. The image is a head-and-shoulders portrait of a smiling woman with glasses wearing a black sweater, before a wooded area in the background. I have no idea who this person is, and when I click the link, it goes to the circumstellar disc article, which contains no such image in the article. Can someone shed some light on this? (The same image pops up when I hover over the link in this message, in Show Preview mode.) Mathglot (talk) 08:19, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

That's the default thumbnail of the lead video - see File:A Stars Spiral.ogv; but our article uses |thumbtime=50 to change the thumbnail so that's why you don't see the women when viewing the article. Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:27, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Mathglot it is due to the default thumbnail vs the thumbail at t= 50s. hope it helps clarifying your mystery. --DBig Xrayᗙ 08:28, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Aha, at least I understand, now; thanks to both of you. I imagine there's no way to force that same image somehow in hover mode? I wonder how many others will encounter this (or other examples, in other articles using thumbtime). Is it worth making a request that wikimedia software interpret the 'thumbtime' param also in hover mode? Mathglot (talk) 10:02, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

See mw:Extension:PageImages#Why is my page image a blank box? and phab:T197839. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:32, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Limit on template transclusions?

Nothing displays in WP:CRAPWATCH/SETUP#N2 and subsequent sections. Is this a template limit of some sorts? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:12, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Yup, that's what it is. I guess I'll split the page after the next bot run. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:59, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Headbomb, I've had luck just rendering the page via the bot without using templates for things that big. SQL ^{Query me!} 05:06, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@SQL: I tweaked Module:JCW-selected to be a bit less costly. It's a temporary solution, but it's workable for now. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:07, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, your post-include is hitting the limit at

Post‐expand include size: 2097152/2097152 bytes

Template argument size: 1953728/2097152 bytes

--Izno (talk) 04:04, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: It looks like there is a fairly easy fix because User:JL-Bot/Questionable.cfg is using {{JCW-selected}} which invokes Module:JCW-selected. A small tweak to the module would allow it be used with #invoke from the page. That is, eliminate the template. That would halve the expansion size. Johnuniq (talk) 06:07, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

It would also break the bot (although it could be updated). But most likely, it would probably make the page impossible to use because understanding LUA is very much like asking an illiterate Greek person to dictate Chinese text to a deaf English-speaker, who must translate it in German. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:15, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

It's not that bad. The following shows some existing wikitext followed by its replacement:

{{JCW-selected|Academic Research in Science, Engineering, Art and Management|ARSEAM|source=BLP}}

{{#invoke:JCW-selected|main|Academic Research in Science, Engineering, Art and Management|ARSEAM|source=BLP}}

The only difference is "#invoke" and "|main". Johnuniq (talk) 06:58, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: I am not having much experience in dealing with the issue being discussed here. But my message is just to inform you that if such a replacement is done, I think the page will come in the category Template Programming Element which is related to WP:WCW.Adithyak1997 (talk) 07:04, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

No, there's nothing wrong with #invoke. For example, see List of cities by sunshine duration which has 4173 examples like {{#invoke:biglist|weatherboxcols|183.0}}. Johnuniq (talk) 07:11, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Template:Gallery horrible display error

As has been noted at Template talk:Gallery#All gallery image captions end in "- so far...", there is a pretty horrible-in-my-view display error going on in "template:Gallery" which puts extraneous, undermining "so far ..." into every photo gallery into wikipedia. It really trashes appearance of articles, making everything look like it has an "under construction"-type appearance. Could someone please address this? --Doncram (talk) 00:02, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

To clarify, whenever I see photos in the gallery template, I see the text "-so far..." added to the end of each caption. I first noticed this in the last few days, but I don't see gallery photos every day so who knows when it started. It doesn't appear if I'm logged out, and my impression is that it's not appearing for all or even most accounts (since @Redrose64: doesn't seem to see it). Any thoughts? It does add a bit of a conspiratorial tone to all my image captions, which I don't hate. Screenshot here... Thanks all! Ajpolino (talk) 00:13, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't see any "so far" and it's not in the html. Does it happen at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_Residential_Historic_District?safemode=1? Does it happen at Help:Gallery tag#Syntax which does not use the template? What is your browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:18, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

At Help:Gallery tag#Syntax I see it at every image caption. At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_Residential_Historic_District?safemode=1? I do not see the "-so far". Browser is Firefox. I also see it on Microsoft Edge Ajpolino (talk) 00:30, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I have been seeing it for months i think. At first I thought it was by edits of one editor who I thought was indicating the articles were under construction. At Help:Gallery tag#Syntax I see "1 - So far...", "2 - So far ...", "3 - So far... ", "4 - So far...". I am using Chrome browser. --Doncram (talk) 00:35, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

User:Ajpolino/common.js loads User:Fred Gandt/getUnpatrolledOfAlexNewArtBotResultsPages.js which loads User:Fred Gandt/getUnpatrolledOfAlexNewArtBotResultsPages.css by Fred Gandt. It adds the text in certain circumstances:

#mw-content-text ul p:after {
    content: " - so far...";
}

It's not intended for gallery captions but maybe they recently changed something which activates the old css code. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:38, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

(ec) I don't know what "safemode" is, but at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_Residential_Historic_District?safemode=1] I do not see the "so far...". At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_Residential_Historic_District every caption has "so far ..." appended. --Doncram (talk) 00:41, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

safemode=1 omits loading JavaScript and CSS pages from userspace and the MediaWiki namespace. The script only appears to have around 25 users so it's not an urgent issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:54, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Ah, thank you very much PrimeHunter! Removed that line from User:Ajpolino/common.js, and all is right with the world again. I don't use that script anymore, so no further fix is required for me. Thanks for your time! Happy editing! Ajpolino (talk) 04:04, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I have fixed the userscript's call to load the offending CSS where it shouldn't and apologise for the inconvenience. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 17:11, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

"Top of page" button

Webmaster: Suggestion: Place a floating, always-on-top, (return to) top-of-page button on the Wikipedia entry pages.

Please let me know if this suggestion should be posted elsewhere.

Zanski (talk) 18:18, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Zanski: See User:Danski454/goToTop.js for a floating, always on the bottom, return to top-of-page. --DannyS712 (talk) 18:21, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Image updated on Commons but the old version still on Wikipedia

In the article Quillette the logo (File:Quillette.png) has a white background that doesn't exist in the latest version of the image. Caching issue? I already tried ?action=purge --RaphaelQS (talk) 17:33, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

That seems a lot like phab:T198370. I added a comment there to ask about it. Anomie ⚔ 18:31, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. --RaphaelQS (talk) 20:03, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Syntax highlighting

Today I set out to fix a highlighting error and remove a page from Category:Pages with syntax highlighting errors. Upon evaluating Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Settings/Removing caps in headers I see <syntaxhighlight lang="xml"> in use and find that to be correct according to the category's link where it says: "To correct them, just define a known computing language name as an attribute ..." What am I missing about this page? And, if I may be bold, how important is it (in the scheme of things) that these highlighting errors be fixed? Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 07:26, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Most of the ones I can see are on user pages and user talk pages, where people are probably just using it for appearance. We probably don't really have to touch those, although we could if we want to give them syntax highlighting. There were also some articles in the category. (I just went through the category and fixed all eight.) In many cases, we can fix these errors by specifying lang="text", although I saw some cases where that was being abused (i.e. there was actually code in a valid programming language). TL;DR It's probably not too bad to keep this category around, as it does improve readability of code to have syntax highlighting where we can. Enterprisey (talk!) 07:49, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Enterprisey, I appreciate your reply. The more important question I am struggling with is: why is the page using <syntaxhighlight lang="xml"> categorizing as an error when "xml" is listed as a known language to use? If I change the attribute to "text" everything is fine and it should be with "xml" too (if I am seeing things correct?). FWIW, I also tried "Xml", "XML", and ".xml" but all categorized an error. And I changed the quotation marks just in case the ones in use weren't what they seemed. Thank you again.--John Cline (talk) 08:17, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight doesn't mention it but there appears to be a size limit for <syntaxhighlight>...</syntaxhighlight>. I don't know how large it is. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:50, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

That is an interesting hypothesis ~~but it doesn't follow that other language attributes like "text" would be unaffected~~.--John Cline (talk) 10:01, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Settings/Removing caps in headers also has the error category when I preview it with "text". I have "Show hidden categories" enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:46, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I see that you are correct PrimeHunter; not sure how I came to believe the "text" attribute worked. I tested it and clearly interpreted the results wrongly.--John Cline (talk) 03:55, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

phab:T104109#3879800 says: "const HIGHLIGHT_MAX_LINES = 1000; and const HIGHLIGHT_MAX_BYTES = 102400; are defined, this causes codes that contain more than 1000 lines or have size than 100kB don't get highlighted." This should be mentioned at mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight#Syntax highlighting error category. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:03, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

It has now been added to mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight#Syntax highlighting error category. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:20, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

100k-byte limit is mentioned here.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:15, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Transpose (in Mobile) This Page is Protected to Prevent Vandalism to You Are Not Allowed to Edit This Page Based on Its Level of Protection (Locked Instead of View Source on Desktop)

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Village pump (technical) § Transpose (in Mobile) This Page is Protected to Prevent Vandalism to You Are Not Allowed to Edit This Page Based on Its Level of Protection (Locked Instead of View Source on Desktop)

– Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:00, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

In the mobile version of the site for protected pages, there is a teeny tiny pen icon with a lock on the top of the page. When clicked it says This Page is Protected to Prevent Vandalism. Shouldn't that be changed into You Are Not Allowed to Edit This Page? It sounds more fancier than that.

In addition View Source on desktop rather be transposed to Locked. Let both of these changes happen before 2020. Responses if needed.

That's all,

67.81.163.178 (talk) 14:29, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Oppose both per WP:KISS. View source provides an option to editors to copy the content to their sandbox or userspace and continue the editing should they choose to edit, LOCKED will simply turn the new users away. (P.s. someone should rename this thread title) --DBig Xrayᗙ 18:17, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Oppose per WP:BITE. The current notice is made to not drive people away from the project. This new message would be to off-putting to new editors. ^{[Username Needed]} 10:05, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-06

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

Changes later this week

It was easy to untick a box by accident in Special:Preferences. This will now be fixed. [12]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 February. It will be on all wikis from 7 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:11, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

New CharInsert code does not record the user pref between sessions

Some weeks ago, we were told at English Wikisource to update the old CharInsert script by copying it from here. Being a gadget, it is not supported by Wikimedia. The older script recorded the user preferred character row in a cookie. This stopped working since the code was updated. Here is the difference between the two scripts.

Is there a way to correct/update this feature because when editing we must re-select our character row on every page. This may not be important on Wikipedia, but I proofread ~30-50 pages a day. — Ineuw talk 18:05, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Ineuw, u didn't update the gadget dependencies of the gadget's definition. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:55, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Many thanks. Even though I don't know how to do it, I understand what it means. On the other hand, it does not work here on Wikipedia either. On Wikisource, will ask someone with familiarity with the gadgets. — Ineuw talk 20:05, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Ineuw, it works for me... Note we no longer use cookies, we use LocalStorage. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:11, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Thank you again for the info!!!— Ineuw talk 20:23, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Edit not saved

I tried to add this to Portal:Current events but I got “error, edit not saved”. Please help.

Politics and elections

Politics of Virginia
- Virginia Governor Ralph Northam meets with his cabinet and speaks with other officials as he considers resigning following two days over controversy about a racist photo in his medical school yearbook. (Los Angeles Times)
- Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax is accused of sexual assault. He denies allegations. (Huffington Post) (Townhall) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.142.108.78 (talk) 20:46, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Rapid grant to enhance the ProveIt gadget

Hi! I just requested a grant to enhance the ProveIt gadget. ProveIt is a popular reference manager on several wikis (including this one) and the grant is to make it compatible with the new wikitext editor, the visual editor, and other goodies. Any ideas, questions, comments or endorsements are warmly welcome on the grant page. Thanks! Felipe (talk) 20:53, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

What has happened to mobile viewing?

In the past two days, the display on my phone has changed so that it is no longer possible to search, log in, or edit. It seems to be read-only. Until a few days ago the mobile version had some icons at the top: a magnifying glass for searching, a log-in button, and an edit button. The article itself hid the content of sections, with the ability to open a section and read. There was a button at the bottom of the page that allowed switching to desktop view. Starting two or three days ago, all that has changed. Now when I go to Wikipedia on my cell phone, there is no search function, no log-in, no edit, no choice of desktop. All I get is the article (the entire article, nothing hidden). If I go to another page via a wikilink, the new page shows the old format (with the magnifying glass etc.) for about half a second, then switches to this view-only version that I can’t do anything with. Is this happening to other people? Anyone know anything about it? -- MelanieN (talk) 19:53, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

m.wikipedia.org is working properly for me . Have you tried clearing your cache or restarting your device? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:20, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Tried it just now (what I call the Microsoft Solution - turn it off and on again.) Didn't help. -- MelanieN (talk) 20:31, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Are you in a mobile web browser, or in the Wikipedia App? What version? If a browser, which browser? — xaosflux ^Talk 20:34, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Xaosflux:there is no search function, no log-in, no edit, no choice of desktop Sounds to me like she's using a browser (speaking of which, it works okay for me on Firefox on Android), but I'm guessing of course... Adam9007 (talk) 23:43, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

It's an iphone and it uses Safari. It has worked just fine up until a couple of days ago. Has anyone else even ever seen this read-only mode I seem to be stuck with now? -- MelanieN (talk) 02:10, 5 February 2019 (UTC) .

BINGO! I found it! On the line at the top of the page that displays the url, on the left, there is a little display of four lines. If you accidentally touch it, it converts a web page to read-only. Touch it again and things are supposed to go back to normal. That function is "reader view". It's supposed to be an option: when you go to a page, a line appears briefly at the top of the page that says "reader view available". My problem is that now on every page I go to, the "reader view available" line doesn't display; instead "reader view" is already checked. If I uncheck it it works OK for that page, but the next page has it pre-checked again. Clearly this is something within my phone, not something coming from Wikipedia. I can't find anything about this in my Safari settings. I will have to seek help online to find out why it is doing this. Sorry to bother you all. -- MelanieN (talk) 02:29, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

OK, I found it - here's the deal just in case it ever comes up for anyone else. If you hold down on the reader view icon instead of just tapping it, it opens a dropdown menu that allows you to select to always use reader view, and to cancel always using reader view. So now it's fixed. I am reminded of one of my favorite sayings: "I used to have a dream that one day my computer would be as easy to use as my phone. And my dream came true. Because now I don't understand my phone either." -- MelanieN (talk) 02:37, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

@MelanieN: It must be a browser-specific thing as I've just found a button in Firefox (Android) that seems to do precisely what you described. Adam9007 (talk) 02:42, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Perform an API search with regexs

So I know there is a way to do some awesome searching using regular expression... For example I can search for insource:/table-layout:fixed;/ insource:/\{\{Episode list/ and get the pages containing those... Is there a way to do that in an API search? I'm trying to get a list of all the pages that this search returns so that I can do an WP:AWB clean up on them... --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 19:40, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Actually just found an easy workaround... Petscan actually has this built in! :-) --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 19:46, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: If you are trying to get a page list for AWB, there is an option to generate a page list from Special:Search, which only requires the search string. I have successfully used the regex search with it. --Izno (talk) 20:45, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Izno: when you say there is an option to generate a page list from Special:Search, where is that option? In AWB, petscan or here on the wiki? --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 21:13, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: In AWB, Source dropdown, Wiki search (and then choose title/text and main/all spaces). --Izno (talk) 22:27, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Izno: So weird... I could have sworn I tried that and it didn't work... I probably had a typo or something last time. Thanks a mil! --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 22:36, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

If you work on the unix command-line check out Wikiget. The "-a" function for regex searches. It returns a list of page titles. eg.

wikiget -a "insource:/table-layout:fixed;/ insource:/[{][{][ ]*[Ee]pisode list/"

Has many other API calls, originally designed for AWB and bot writers making lists of article pages. -- GreenC 21:35, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

To answer the actual question asked here, you just use list=search, passing the same query as the value of the srsearch parameter (and the namespace IDs as srnamespaces). You can try it in ApiSandbox. Anomie ⚔ 14:02, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Unnecessary div tags

In the article Basidiomycota, I was able to find around 15 tags which does not have any data. If somebody can, please remove those unwanted ones. The tool I used to find it out was WPCleaner.Adithyak1997 (talk) 08:01, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

There is some weird wikitext in that article with div/span stuff. Some of it was added on 4 December 2018 by a new user who is not currently active. Would that have been a broken tool? Johnuniq (talk) 08:56, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I've removed it all. I've no idea what happened. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:16, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Looks like phab:T189148. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{☎ Dinoguy1000} 15:13, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

14 articles need to be eaten. No coffee though, please. --Izno (talk) 15:35, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

I've cleared them all. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:07, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Inconsistent behavior of Template:Maplink when using inverse-shape

Today I noticed that when you enlarge the interactive map on Washington, D.C., it doesn't show the shape at all.

Map

If you copy the code ({{maplink|frame=yes|plain=y|frame-width=285|frame-height=285|zoom=8|id=Q61|type=shape-inverse}}) somewhere else (see right), it's getting worse there: it doesn't even show the shape in the frame. Keep in mind I kept the id= part, so it's supposed to work.

I can't seem to reproduce this bug with other data, but found another inconsistency:

{{maplink|type=shape-inverse|id=Q1094308|text=Inverted shape (no frame)}}
Inverted shape (no frame)
{{maplink|frame=yes|type=shape-inverse|id=Q1094308|text=Inverted shape (has frame)}}
Inverted shape (has frame)

As you can see I have two exactly same maplink, but only the second one has frame.

When you click the first one (link), the enlarged interactive map zooms out all the way to global;
When you click on the second one (frame), however, the enlarged interactive maps zooms in to the area selected (better behavior) The frame itself still shows global, though. --fireattack (talk) 20:18, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

@Fireattack: I suspect the first issue occurs because the OSM relation for the District of Columbia contains a building in the middle, which doesn't have either of the roles "inner" or "outer". This could result in the multipolygon being assumed to be invalid by Kartographer, depending on how Kartographer interprets that building.

The second problem looks like a separate issue to me. Jc86035 (talk) 18:41, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Time to allow double redirects?

In 2014 there was a proposal to allow some types of double redirects. It resulted in a clear consensus for, but it wasn't very well attended, and it doesn't seem to have been implemented. Given the problems that are sometimes created by the bots that fix double redirects (see this 2017 thread for an example), I'm wondering whether it might not be time to revive this idea. I would just like to probe the ground now: what are the technical limitations? Have there been any other discussions that I'm not aware of? Generally, what do people think about that? – Uanfala (talk) 02:24, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

The relevant task is phab:T67064, which appears to be blocked by phab:T32359 — MusikAnimal ^talk 03:16, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Talk page archive

Hi, I've been told (rightly) that I need to archive my talk page. Now someone did this for me many years ago and an archive icon appeared on the right hand side of my talk page to allow me to access the archive - just realized it no longer appears, any ideas how to access my earlier archive? As a follow-up what is the easiest way of creating another archive, thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 08:20, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

@GrahamHardy: I fixed the link to your past archive on your talk page. As for future archiving, see H:ARC for setting up automatic archiving --DannyS712 (talk) 08:28, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Image appears to be broken?

Resolved

The article Ophelia (John William Waterhouse) has an image which appears to be broken (incomplete upload), at least to me. The article was created today. However, the image is transcluded from Commons, and there it is not broken (last version uploaded in 2013). How is this possible and what should we do about it? Editing the article does not help. Thanks.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:58, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

It looks fine to me.--Auric talk 09:09, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Same, this may have been a server issue but it looks fine now. -- Luk ^talk 12:58, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Still broken for me. This might be a caching issue, though I purged it here and also the image on Commons.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:37, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

It works now. Probably a caching issue indeed.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:06, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Village Pump source code download

Is there a download link for the VP source code? I want to make an online forum and want to make it wikipedia style. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bagels95 (talk • contribs) 16:22, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

There isn't a source code for the Village pump but it works on MediaWiki. The source code for that can be found here. ^{[Username Needed]} 17:32, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Forgot to say the installation guide can be found here. ^{[Username Needed]} 17:34, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

@Bagels95: Note that MediaWiki was made for collaborative editing of the same articles in a wiki. The same software is used for discussions so users can edit or remove posts by eachother. This requires well-behaved users or some policing. mw:Structured Discussions is an alternative but the English Wikipedia has rejected it. If you are not making a wiki then I suggest you use actual forum softwrae. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:26, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Candidates for speedy deletion not categorizing

In regard to the following empty categories:

They are all tagged CSD-G6 and they all indicate their categorization into both Category:Candidates for speedy deletion and Category:Candidates for uncontroversial speedy deletion yet none of the pages show up in either category. Is there a reason why they are lingering in this state? Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 16:32, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

A null edit will fix them. I take it they were recently emptied? If so, giving them a couple hours for the job queue to catch up to them should do it, too. —Cryptic 16:48, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Cryptic; the null edit did categorize a page. In time we'll know if the job queue will catch the rest. Thank you again.--John Cline (talk) 17:09, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

This is a long-term problem affecting Joe's Null Bot (talk · contribs). Basically, any category page that transcludes {{Monthly clean up category}} should be WP:NULLEDITed once a day, to ensure that its parent categories are correct - if the category itself is empty, the page goes into Category:Noindexed pages, Category:Candidates for speedy deletion and Category:Candidates for uncontroversial speedy deletion as well as its usual cats. There is a closely-related problem described at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard/Archive 12#Checking for bot activity, Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 77#Joe's Null Bot task 5 clone and phab:T210307. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:15, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Linking country's infobox "Area" heading to geography article

What causes the {{Infobox country}} "Area" heading, which is implicitly generated for the various "area_..." parameters, to automagically link to that country's geography article? Why does it happen for Canada and the United Kingdom, and not for the United States, where the only difference I can see is that the area for the U.S. is given in square miles, rather than square kilometers? I've searched for an explanation but found none. Dhtwiki (talk) 01:26, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

United States article uses |linking_name = America instead of |linking_name = the United States. Ruslik_Zero 09:00, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

And that caused an ifexist on Geography of America which is red so no link was made. I have added area_link = Geography of the United States to directly select the target Geography of the United States.[13] PrimeHunter (talk) 12:14, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks to both for the enlightenment and to PrimeHunter for fixing it at the US article. Dhtwiki (talk) 02:49, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Lines appearing while editing a PC-protected page on IE11 and enabling the Legacy Toolbar gadget

I was testing out the old-school Legacy toolbar gadget with Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7. Then I went to one of the pages listed at Special:StablePages. Then I went to the source/editor page and scrolled down and then up the editing window. Then I saw lines appearing (as seen in the below photo).

At first, I assumed that the PHP7 beta feature is responsible. However, then I disabled the PHP7 and then found the same results. I realized that it's the issue with using the Legacy Toolbar gadget itself at a "pending changes"-protected article on IE11. Fortunately, the lines can disappear when moving around the mouse, hitting one or a few keys, or clicking on the wikitext editor. -- George Ho (talk) 13:15, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

That's one of the many glitches that IE11 manifests when it starts running low on memory (along with click target areas not scrolling with the rest of the page, switching to 8-bit colors with arbitrary mapping, pages flashing, tabs spontaeously popping themselves into new windows, etc.). I'd try restarting your browser, if not your whole computer. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:50, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Tried restarting the browser and then the computer. The issue still persists. George Ho (talk) 05:34, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Sorting search results

Oft requested, but finally possible at the backend side:

Sort by last edited ascending
Sort by last edited descending
Sort by page creation ascending
Sort by page creation descending
Sort by least amount of incoming links
Sort by highest amount of incoming links
Sort by direct text match relevance no boosts and penalties for certain pages, like in default relevance
Completely unsorted
Sort by relevance (default)

There is no UI for this yet (nor a timeline on that), but I figured people would be interested. You can thank mostly User:EBernhardson (WMF). I also care to point out that work on this was started last april and that initially adding some of these options took up to 10 weeks of processing historic information (this wasn't just flipping some sort of switch in a search engine.. ). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:49, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! I have flicked together a primitive script which adds sidebar links for each sorting on search pages: User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:49, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Install with this in your common JavaScript:

importScript('User:PrimeHunter/Search_sort.js'); // Linkback: [[User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js]]

PrimeHunter (talk) 11:58, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Cool. I've created T215487 about missing search results when sorting by creation date. Graham87 07:37, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Regex question

Is there a way to have some type of match a specific but generic pattern more than once via regex? What I mean by that is something if you have something like

...
{{JCW-selected|Journal of Crap|note=Note 0}}
{{JCW-selected|Journal of Stuff|note=Note 1}}
{{JCW-selected|Journal of Stuff|note=Note 2}}
{{JCW-selected|Journal of Things|note=Note 3}}
...

I'd want to match

{{JCW-selected|Journal of Stuff|note=Note 1}}
{{JCW-selected|Journal of Stuff|

but not

{{JCW-selected|Journal of Stuff|note=Note 2}}
{{JCW-selected|Journal of Things|

I can regex something like \{\{JCW-selected\|([^\|]*)\|.*\}\}\n\{\{JCW-selected\|([^\|]*)\|, but I want a way to have BOTH ([^\|]*) groups being the same to have a match.

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:57, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Use \1 in place of the second ([^\|]*). —Cryptic 20:04, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Wonderful. I've just leveled up in regex! Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:06, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: (edit conflict) I would try (\{\{JCW-selected\|[^\|]*)\|.*\}\}\n\1.* --DannyS712 (talk) 20:09, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

It is generally called a back reference. Ruslik_Zero 20:11, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Imho, the best resource on or off the web for this, is Jan Goyvaerts' regular-expressions.info. Comprehensive, accurate, clear, and well-presented. Mathglot (talk) 08:27, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes it's a pretty good source. But I didn't have a term for what I was looking for, so I couldn't really search for it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 09:42, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Template:OSM Location map syntax error

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T214984

The Template:OSM Location map is showing "Syntax error" as an output for all instances of its use (for example, 2019 Jolo Cathedral bombings and Alameda, California#Attractions. Not sure where to report this or who to contact for assistance in fixing the template. {{u|waddie96}} {talk} 17:53, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Waddie96, I determined this is due to the new PHP7 feature. I have reported it here. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:42, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

TheDJ Thank you, I've added a comment to T214984 as well. {{u|waddie96}} {talk} 11:11, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Strange colouring

There's a gadget somewhere that colours the title of an article to match its rating: green for B class, orange for start class, etc. But this morning it seems to be malfunctioning, and instead of a title, I am getting a solid block of colour. I don't remember what the gadget is. It has only just stopped working properly. Any help would be appreciated. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:12, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Hawkeye7, which browser/OS are you using? Do any errors appear in the console? Enterprisey (talk!) 20:15, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm on Windows 7 with Firefox 64.0.2. I haven't upgraded Firefox. There are no errors, just a lot of warnings eg. "This page is using the deprecated ResourceLoader module "schema.ReadingDepth". See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205744 for migration info." Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:24, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

The gadget concerned is "Display an assessment of an article's quality in its page header (documentation)" which uses MediaWiki:Gadget-metadata.js and MediaWiki:Gadget-metadata.css, neither of which have changed recently. It

Works for me in MonoBook, Opera 36. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:03, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

It also works for me on Firefox 65 on Timeless on Windows 10. The issue as described sounds like a conflict in scripts. What else do you have loaded Hawkeye gadgetwise? Try turning everything off/on 1 by 1. --Izno (talk) 02:35, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Or start by logging out and testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Seven?withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-metadata.js&withCSS=MediaWiki:Gadget-metadata.css. If it's broken then the problem is not in your user settings. It works for me. What is your skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:16, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Massdelete (nuke)

I tried to delete all the pages created by sock Emoteplump (talk · contribs · count). I asked the tool to list the pages. It listed 190. I think I unchecked one and then clicked on delete. Got an error message effectively saying it was taking too long and please break it down into smaller chunks. I changed the max from 500 to 75. This time it listed a bunch of pages which I deleted (I didn't count to make sure there were 75), after which they were all redlinked, but I didn't click on any of them to be sure. Then I went back to the list of new pages by the user, and it didn't look like anything was deleted. I clicked on a couple, and they were still there. After that point, nothing worked except for the helluvit I manually deleted one page, which worked. Now each time I try to list pages for deletion (I changed the max to 50 just cause) it lists, uh, two.

I am not going to delete all those pages one at a time. What to do?--Bbb23 (talk) 13:54, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Special:Nuke will only show creations back so far, but why isn't it showing pages created today? I don't know. You could try using User:Animum/massdelete.js, which enables special:Massdelete, but that'll require some deft copy/paste work. Maybe someone else has a better suggestion. Also, FYI, Emoteplump (alt) exists. —DoRD (talk) 14:15, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@DoRD: Yes, the word "recently" is not defined. In my experience it goes back earlier than just the same day, at least several days, but I have no idea what the cut-off is. In any event, it doesn't explain why it says it deleted 75 pages when in fact it had not. I've found a fair amount of buggy behavior by the tool, but it's all I've got. Thanks for the heads up about the alt account: now blocked.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:26, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Your logs show it did delete those pages. (Maybe not immediately?) I've manually deleted most of the rest. Left a few portals (six according to xtools) that other people had edited beyond categorization; I'd have speedied them if they were articles, but who knows what constitutes a major edit in that useless should-be-a-gadget namespace. —Cryptic 14:37, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Wait - when you say you "went back to the list of new pages by the user" - do you mean the "Articles created" link in Special:Contributions that goes to xtools? AFAIK that looks at the toolserver database replicas, which are always a few minutes behind production (and occasionally much longer). —Cryptic 14:42, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Thanks much for your trouble. I didn't look at my logs, but I did actually look at some pages themselves, and they weren't deleted. Of course, I didn't look at all, and I don't know in what order it deletes the pages, so maybe I looked at the "wrong" ones. As for the edits to the several you left, I am clueless as well. The Transhumanist, who is apparently experienced in this area, may know whether they can be deleted. Response to your second comment: Yes, but I waited for a while before giving up, perhaps not long enough.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:48, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I've looked into this a little bit more. Special:Nuke pulls its list of pages from the recentchanges table (of Special:Recentchanges fame), so it should go back a month. But Emoteplump's relevant edits aren't in it. What gives? quarry:query/33170 has a snapshot of the current state. —Cryptic 15:46, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Cryptic and DoRD: Thank you for pining me. Please wait on this. Before you delete anything, please make a list, so that I or someone else can re-create those portals. Just nuking a large number of portals from the portals collection would be disruptive. — The Transhumanist 18:06, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Special:Log/create/Emoteplump. —Cryptic 18:17, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank goodness for logs! I was under the impression that all evidence of sockpuppets was eradicated. It's good to keep these records. Helps us undo the damage. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 21:07, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Use Special:DeleteBatch. MW131tester (talk) 13:41, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Edit is good when previewed but not good when saved

When previewing this edit to add a "context note" to a template using <ref group=note>annotation</ref> everything renders fine but when published, an error message is displayed where the annotation was displayed in preview. This belies the purpose of previewing an edit. in my opinion, whereas I presume a problem exists. Is there a technical explanation? Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 07:29, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I see a big red "Cite error" at the bottom of the page when I preview it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 07:58, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I am using the 2017 wikitext editor. Perhaps the bug resides there?--John Cline (talk) 08:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

When you have a <ref group=note>...</ref> there must be a matching <references group=note /> or a {{reflist|group=note}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:16, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I understand Redrose64, thank you. Although mistaken, I had thought it announced, some three years ago: that talk pages would be having this markup written in at a default level, precisely to allow reference notations to appear on talk pages, without needing these tags? Nevertheless, this only compounds my befuddlement as to why the annotation appears, in it's expected location, when previewing the changes in edit mode (using the 2017 wikitext editor). This may be the wrong forum, if it is a bug with that editor? But I trust the advice given here, and it's all technical to me! Thanks again.--John Cline (talk) 11:13, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

The 2017 WTE has not completely implemented all of the behaviors of the 2010 or 2003 WTEs. This is likely just a regression and should be filed as a task in Phabricator. --Izno (talk) 14:03, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

As for default beahvior, reference notations are added at the bottom by default with the default reference group, but I'm not sure what happens with a "notes" group. I expect that to be the same behavior. --Izno (talk) 14:04, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Redirect not redirecting

I added a forced redirect to User:A 10 fireplane/sandbox to Special:Log/newusers so when I click on my sandbox I will be redirected to help make fighting vandls faster but its not actually redirecting me. A 10 fireplane ^{Imform me} 16:45, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@A 10 fireplane: Apparently this is a built-in restriction. It's mentioned in the second paragraph at Help:Redirect#Syntax. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@John of Reading: ahh ok, thank you for the quick response

A 10 fireplane ^{Imform me} 16:54, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@A 10 fireplane: You can place this in your common JavaScript to make a Newusers link next to the sandbox link:

$( document ).ready( function() {
  mw.util.addPortletLink(
    'p-personal',
    mw.util.getUrl( 'Special:Log/newusers' ),
    'Newusers',
    'pt-newusers',
    'Go to Special:Log/newusers',
    null,
    '#pt-sandbox'
  );
});

Or this to place the link next to Recent changes under Interaction in the sidebar:

$( document ).ready( function() {
  mw.util.addPortletLink(
    'p-interaction',
    mw.util.getUrl( 'Special:Log/newusers' ),
    'Newusers',
    'pt-newusers',
    'Go to Special:Log/newusers',
    null,
    '#n-recentchanges'
  );
});

PrimeHunter (talk) 17:06, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter:That would be great, when I try to paste the first one (to add next to sandbox) after pressing "create sorce" it wont allow me to paste the code A 10 fireplane ^{Imform me} 17:13, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

What error message is it showing? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:14, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I am just unable to paste A 10 fireplane ^{Imform me} 17:16, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Do you click in the edit area before trying to paste? How do you try to paste? Can you type there? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:28, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter:Ues I clicked on the edit area, I am editing on an ipad so I tried taping on the space and the "paste" window wont appear, yes I can type there A 10 fireplane ^{Imform me} 17:35, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@A 10 fireplane: js and css pages use a default code editor which may interact poorly with your iPad. Try changing to the wikitext editor by clicking the < > icon to the top left of the edit area. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:49, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: awesome I got it, thank you so much

A 10 fireplane ^{Imform me} 17:54, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

GoogleTrans.js

The gadget GoogleTrans.js moves the caret during editing in VisualEditor. This makes it very hard (impossible) to edit some words. It could be it interact with something else, but in the end I turned it off. Jeblad (talk) 16:37, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Question? This may sound dumb, but Jeblad could we rename that to something like GTranslate.js? I was pretty confused there for a bit. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 16:59, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

The row GoogleTrans[ResourceLoader]|GoogleTrans.js from MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. If you or anyone else will rename the gadget feel free. I am not an admin. Jeblad (talk) 18:43, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

WTF???

Why does doing this mess up the entire rendering of the page? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:54, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

It looks like there's an unclosed nowiki tag after the "2:02, 7 February 2019 (UTC)" timestamp (well above your comment). When you added your comment, the parser finally found a closing tag for it, and everything in between was treated as nowiki'd text. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:00, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Ah I see. There was a 'nowkiki' tag. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:03, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Proposed gadget: Shortdesc helper

I recently revised my user script User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper to fix some minor issues and use OOUI, and I'm proposing that it become a gadget. It apparently is/will be possible to conveniently edit short descriptions on the mobile app and it would seem good to have a gadget for doing so on desktop; shortdesc helper has been installed and used by a reasonable number of people and I haven't received much reports of bugs or issues with it. Galobtter (pingó mió) 13:39, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Support as a useful step in involving more editors in this task. – But have you or will you fix the defect whereby input of {{Short description|none}} doesn't register and the helper script continues to display "Missing" or (in the case of a list article) "Wikimedia list article"?: Bhunacat10 (talk), 20:17, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

{{short description|none}} doesn't actually change the short description displayed on mobile (which would still pull from wikidata) - the relevant page property is not made empty - so the wikidata description should still be displayed but I'll see if I can put an indicator somewhere and disable the "missing". Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:28, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Support Useful script, works as intended barring a small bug which I have raised with the maintainer. << FR ^(mobileUndo) 03:53, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
Let me bump this for some more input. Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:36, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
@Galobtter: above you mentioned some additional work to do, what was the outcome of that? — xaosflux ^Talk 14:57, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
Also, are you good with it starting in 'Testing and development' section (and obviously OPT-IN only)? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:28, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
Xaosflux I've added support for {{short description|none}} so that work's done; obviously opt-in; I'd say it can be in testing and development while we make sure that the transition to a gadget didn't break anything but once that's done it should go in "editing". Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:47, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
Support, Easy to use and efficient. I have done thousands of short descriptions with it. The "none" issue is a deliberate bypass by WMF which they say will remain until we have 2 million short descriptions on Wikipedia. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:10, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
@Galobtter: I've added your script to the gadget system, it is currently listed under testing and development. Feel free to advertise in the appropriate venues to get some production testers. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:17, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
@Xaosflux and Galobtter: I just tried it, and it wasn't working as a gadget. But, as an imported script, it still works. Was it set up properly to be a gadget? --DannyS712 (talk) 02:46, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
I installed with the base ResourceLoader, if you require additional dependencies let me know. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:03, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Tried moving int the css, and adding RL general - let me know what other options you may need. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:09, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Undone I've pulled this from the gadgets list, think it needs some tech work. For one, the javascript checked can't even finish 'too many errors' on the source. The following pages have been prepped and can be updated on request: MediaWiki:Gadget-Short-description-helper , MediaWiki:Gadget-Short-description-helper.js , MediaWiki:Gadget-Short-description-helper.css . — xaosflux ^Talk 04:15, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Gonna guess that might be due to one indent error per line; the code is indented in a slightly nonstandard way, and each line should be indented by one (more) level due to the outermost if statement. I looked through the code and don't see anything too terrible, although the "clicky" stuff is semantically iffy (as in, "SdhCustomButton" or whatever - naming is hard - might be an alternative). Enterprisey (talk!) 04:32, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Xaosflux: Oh, I thought that was just me. I've been getting the "Warning: too many errors" message too when editing some of my scripts, but was afraid to ask. I just tried pasting Mediawiki:Gadget-morebits.js, Mediawiki:Gadget-popups.js, and MediaWiki:Gadget-afchelper.js/core.js into a sandbox .js page, and each got the same warning, so maybe there's a bug in the code editor? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 04:39, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Oh, haha, I thought you (xaosflux) were running a linter or something, instead of trying to use the code editor. Never mind what I said, then. Thanks for the investigation, Suffusion. Enterprisey (talk!) 04:47, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
@Enterprisey: Well now that you mention it, https://jslint.com isn't able to finish either, but I have to question its advice of "Use spaces, not tabs." on every single line. https://jshint.com only gives four warnings. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 04:57, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Xaosflux Too many errors is because the code is too long - I think the mediawiki code editor linter cannot handle more than 200-400 lines of code before it times out or something. (open up, say User:Enterprisey/reply-link.js or any other reasonably lengthy script, and you can see the same issue) Enterprisey The inner code actually needs to be indented thrice (once for the if, once for the mw.loader.using, and once for callPromiseDescription) - but I don't that bit of IAR so that the code doesn't slide off the page would break anything, or at least cause it to break when made into a gadget but not as a user script. Suffusion of Yellow Tabs is what is recommended by the mediawiki coding conventions :)

@Xaos, I think the issue was that I was inadvertently using an ES6 feature (destructuring assignment), and gadgets may be enforced on to ES5 - when I ran ESlint with wikimedia-client settings on the code, that ES5 enforcement raised errors; I've fixed the issue in an update. That would explain the script breaking when made into a gadget but working fine as a user script. Could you see if the new version works? (just need to update the js with what is in User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper.js) If it doesn't, could you copy what error is in the console, or leave the option of using the gadget long enough in the testing section so I can test it myself? For resourceloader dependancies, they should be "mediawiki.api,mediawiki.notify,oojs-ui-core,oojs-ui-widgets". Thanks for the help! Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:00, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

@Galobtter: may have just been the dependencies, I've updated the gadget from your codebase and reactivated and it seems to be loading now (note: it also seemed to need mediawiki.util - but most gadgets do these days) - however it does seem to be somewhat slow loading to the point of causing quite noticeable screen jumps. Regarding the jump (but not the speed), perhaps it could be moved up and to the right of the tagline, at least then it won't push the page down? I've got a feeling loading all those ooui items are the main delay - they are not normally loaded on articles. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:15, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Xaosflux, Thanks, yeah I've been noticing the script is somewhat slower than before, I'm investigating that and also seeing ways to eliminate the content jump. Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:24, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Yeah... I find that OOUI makes an excessive number of HTML elements for each individual part of the interface, so using plain button elements might help. But in this case there are so few parts of the interface that doing so might only have an effect on slower computers. Enterprisey (talk!) 21:19, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
I don't think the html generated by OOUI is much of an issue, but waiting for it to load may slightly delay the showing of the buttons; the initial interface does not depend on OOUI so in an updated version I've not made it wait for OOUI. I don't think it is possible to speed it up beyond that - because the API query to grab the short description is what appears to take 95%+ of the time - but I've also created a bit of CSS which fills in the space for the script in mainspace pages and so completely eliminates the jump there (looks like that requires creating a second hidden peer gadget just to load that style). Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:16, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
Sounds good to me! Enterprisey (talk!) 09:23, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
- Note to all who may not be aware: If you put /*jshint maxerr:999*/ or some other such large number at the top of the code editor, it should work fine. You don't even have to save it, but you do have to ask nicely if the linter is going to do some extra work. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 14:59, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
  Thanks for the tip! Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:04, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
  
  I'm not sure it's relevant for this particular script, but I understand that there's a regex bug in the latest version of Jshint. See https://github.com/jshint/jshint/issues/3356 if you're interested. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:04, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Infobox mangling template change

I've just created a new template at Template:SCOTUS URL Docket New, which takes two parameters to create a URL. I want to edit the currently used Template:SCOTUS URL Docket, which takes one parameter, to split the one parameter in two and invoke SCOTUS URL Docket New on the parts. But when I try that, the hyperlinks in the resulting Template:Infobox SCOTUS case articles don't format properly — the docket number appears on the next line from the URL and the hyperlink doesn't coalesce. What am I doing wrong? BenbowInn (talk) 20:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@BenbowInn: A noinclude part should usually start at the end of the last line and not on a new line. I have removed a newline from Template:SCOTUS URL Docket New.[14] Does that work as you want? It's hard to tell when you don't give an example. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:18, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: That works correctly. Thank you. BenbowInn (talk) 22:23, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

File or article

Resolved

– Already speedy deleted. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:42, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Just found File:Qari_Waheed_Zafar_Qasmi.jpg something isn't right, can someone sort it out? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 11:23, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

The 'page' is already at MfD, nothing more to do. It's just an article in File namespace where description (of existing file) ought to go. –Ammarpad (talk) 13:34, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

An alignment issue

I have recently tried to replace the center tag with that of div. It landed up in an issue related to alignment. Please check it in the page Template:Wikipedia:Cleanup/Header so that the center tag can be removed.Adithyak1997 (talk) 19:03, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

I see recent edits by Adithyak1997 (talk · contribs), Nardog (talk · contribs) and Izno (talk · contribs). Is there anything that still needs doing? If so, please be specific, since "an issue related to alignment" is rather too vague. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:52, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64:, When I posted this problem, the first section of the template was left aligned which I was not able to make it Centre aligned. But after posting it, Nardog (talk · contribs) as well as Izno (talk · contribs) solved that issue. Currently, there is no problem existing. Thanks for replying.Adithyak1997 (talk) 03:23, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Inability to render ê in "ekhous apiston tênd anarkhian polei" in 3 March 2006 revision

Resolved

– It's just a Unicode control character

If you click edit source, you can see there's supposed to be a character in between the "t" and the "nd", but it's not rendering properly. What could be the cause of that?

(Part of the reason I'm curious is, I'm using a python script to display the contents of an XML file containing that revision to the screen as it's processing it, and it always freezes up, to the point I can't even use ctrl-c to exit out but have to close the entire terminal window, when it gets to that character, so I'm wondering what's the deal with that character, anyway.) MW131tester (talk) 00:35, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@MW131tester: I'm not seeing that in the source? What line is it on (what is a non-accented phrase near it maybe)? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:45, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The character between 't' and 'n' is Unicode character 'DEVICE CONTROL STRING' (U+0090) (UTF-8 two bytes: C2 90). See here.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:47, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

User:Xaosflux, here's a screenshot. User:Trappist the monk, thanks for that resource. MW131tester (talk) 00:50, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@MW131tester: ok so it seems to be garbage in - garbage out, and your script doesn't like garbage. Doesn't seem like there is anything else for us to do here? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:53, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh, interesting, even now it allows us to put a in there, but it won't appear in the diff or when the page is rendered. Okay, I learned something new. Thanks. MW131tester (talk) 01:05, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

The character is in the html of both the diff and the rendered page. It is your browser which does not display anything for it. Neither does mine but I guess some browsers or tools will display a placeholder symbol. My Firefox only does it in the edit area where I see the Unicode number 0090 in a square. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:34, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh yeah, I see it when I do ctrl-u (page source). MW131tester (talk) 12:28, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

editscreen: tag and wiki-tag buttons

My editscreen has the usefull wiki markup buttons below to add tags & wiki-tags (like <sub></sub> and [[]]). Is there a topical page for these? Over there, I would like to ask:

What is the logic behind the order of the options? To me it looks ~~random~~ chaotic. I cannot locate the right button easily.
Why is <small></small> missing?
Could we add option <code><nowiki></nowiki></code>?

-DePiep (talk) 15:13, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

It's made by MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert-core.js with discussion at MediaWiki talk:Edittools. I suggested <code><nowiki></nowiki></code> at MediaWiki talk:Edittools/Archive 8#code and nowiki in one step, more discussion at MediaWiki talk:Edittools/Archive 9#Individual customization? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:26, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

At Help:Edit toolbar ...the size option looks like

.--Moxy (talk) 15:31, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata has option #3 [15]. -DePiep (talk) 16:11, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

CSS error

I get an error message about "persondata" (deprecated, I know) on my User:Randykitty/monobook.css. I must admit my ignorance here and am loath to make changes/delete lines without really understanding what I am doing. Perhaps someone who understands these things could have a look at this page and tell me what needs to be changed, I'd really appreciate that. Thanks! --Randykitty (talk) 09:23, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

I think you just need to remove the (top) table.persondata{...} line. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 12:01, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, just remove the top line. --Izno (talk) 13:49, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Great, thanks people for the quick response! --Randykitty (talk) 17:17, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Resolving issues

Please check the question posted in the page Category talk:Unknown parameters. That page was viewed only by 2 persons (one is myself) after 2017 which forced me to post this message here.Adithyak1997 (talk) 08:32, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@Adithyak1997: Most category pages have few watchers, in this case there are five. This is why you are presented with this message when editing that page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:41, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Sorry. I didn't notice that.Adithyak1997 (talk) 18:37, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Expand language template problem

Hi I noticed that when someone add this template {{Expand language|langcode=ar}} this category appears on the top of the article and it is visible [[Category:{{{topic}}} articles needing translation from Arabic Wikipedia]]. Here is an example [16]. Can this problem be solved? Thanks--SharabSalam (talk) 21:52, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

{{Expand language}} should not be called directly but it should behave better if it's done anyway. I have changed it to accept a missing topic parameter.[17] PrimeHunter (talk) 23:01, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Vojvodina

Hi there, I tried to edit the template in question to display the country parameter correctly by adding | country = Serbia, as before it displayed {{{country}}} and this was breaking the syntax. But I actually want the title to say "Largest cities in Vojvodina", not all of Serbia. Any help? 2607:FEA8:1DE0:7B4:5C5A:EACB:2CF0:A463 (talk) 01:00, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

It doesn't actually have to be a country. I simply said country = Vojvodina.[18] I also removed the name parameter which is only for template pages. and a province parameter which is ignored. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:55, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-07

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

Recent changes

You can use the ambox CSS class to show page issues to mobile readers. When you use ambox there are classes you can use.

Changes later this week

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

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

18:45, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Navigation popups

On Opera, Google and Firefox (other browsers not tested) the disambiguation facility of WP:NAVPOPS seems to have disappeared, I now only get the display options, not the ability to use the tool to disambiguate links. Nthep (talk) 19:18, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Notes not displaying correctly?

I recently noticed in two different browsers some notes displaying strangely. For example, when hovering over the first annotation ('a') on Alexander the Great, all that displays is "^[244]". Also noticed this with the infobox notes on Republic of Macedonia. S.A. Julio (talk) 15:28, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

This is because, the notes also have citations. If you hover over the "[244]" you'll then see the full citation. If it's the anotation that you want to see, then you should click the [a] to take you there. –Ammarpad (talk) 16:00, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@Ammarpad: I don't think that is the intention though? For example, when hovering over annotation 'd' on Alexander the Great, the text "^Ἀλέξανδροςἀλέξωaléxōlit. 'ward off, avert, defend'[251][252]ἀνδρ-andr-ἀνήρanḗrlit. 'man'[253][252][254]" is displayed, when the full note states "The name Ἀλέξανδρος derives from the Greek verb ἀλέξω (aléxō, lit. 'ward off, avert, defend')[251][252] and ἀνδρ- (andr-), the stem of ἀνήρ (anḗr, lit. 'man'),[253][252] and means "protector of men".[254]". Surely the full note displayed while hovering previously? S.A. Julio (talk) 16:21, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

You're right, apparently {{cnote2}} doesn't work properly.

Check Template:Cnote2#Cnote2, last example: text[A] text[B] text[A] text[B]), scroll page to hide the "^ text text text text" lines, and hover over A - no text is displayed, only "^" character - it should display "text text text text". --MarMi wiki (talk) 16:43, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Similar problem is with Template:Cref2 - check example at Template:Cref2#Multiple_occurrences - it works, but displays as "^ab..." or "^...". --MarMi wiki (talk) 16:59, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

There was a technical note a few weeks ago about a change in the behavior of note marks. Possibly related. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:36, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech/News/2018/50 and/or Tech/News/2018/49. --MarMi wiki (talk) 21:55, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

S.A. Julio, last week I updated the gadget to generate those previews, based on a request by Jack who built the house. Perhaps this is a side effect of that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:16, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the report! I fixed {{cnote2}} already, but there are more templates that try to emulate the reference mechanism but don't supply classes which the references usually go with (mw-cite-backlink, reference-text). There are two ways: 1) Add classes to these templates. 2) Update the gadget so that it would support even poorly formatted references.

Although I prepared the solution for the second option, I would suggest the first, as it would eliminate some other issues like hanging non-breaking space in the beginning of the reference text in a tooltip.

The mentioned templates are {{cnote}}, {{note}}, {{note label}}. They are all protected. I prepared versions of them with added classes in my user space: User:Jack who built the house/Template:Cnote, User:Jack who built the house/Template:Note, User:Jack who built the house/Template:Note label. @TheDJ: could you help with updating? Or, we could go with the second option and update the gadget instead. Jack who built the house (talk) 19:40, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Sticky headers scramble table when sorting

Using FFox 63.0.1 on Win10, if I enable the "Make sure that headers of tables remain in view ..." (sticky headers) option, when I click on any of the columns at WP:RSP#Sources to sort it, the legend text is super-imposed over the headers and data rows.

If I remove the class="sortbottom" from the legend rows, the problem goes away (though the legend rows are then included in the sort). —[AlanM1(talk)]— 01:45, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

That's fun. I see the same in Fx 64 on W10. BRB, will see what happens in 65. --Izno (talk) 02:17, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Yup, still in 65. --Izno (talk) 02:19, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I'll note, too, that the headers are missing the vertical borders between columns as well as the rightmost border (the leftmost one is there, though). The bottom border is also missing. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 01:56, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, borders getting clobbered is a known issue. That's a Firefox problem, not a script problem. --Izno (talk) 02:22, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Sister project inline links

Hello, as can be seen from this version, there is apparently a glitch as to the relevant sister project inline link templates, causing that the transclusion of two or more of these in direct succession without using bullet points leads to them all being displayed in one and the same line. Does anybody have an idea how to correspondingly fix those templates (thus, regardless of their concrete transclusion)?--Hildeoc (talk) 20:38, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't think that there is anything wrong with those templates. They are doing pretty much what they are advertised to do. If you want a list without bullet points wrap them in {{plain list}}:

{{plain list|
*{{wiktionary-inline}}
*{{wikiquote-inline}}
*{{Commonscat-inline|Phenomena}}}}

which gives this:

The dictionary definition of village pump (technical)/archive 172 at Wiktionary
Quotations related to Village pump (technical)/Archive 172 at Wikiquote
Media related to Phenomena at Wikimedia Commons

—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:49, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@Hildeoc: Yes, this is as expected (indeed, the template names contain "-inline" for a good reason) and is pretty much the same as the behaviour of plain text. If your page contains this:

The dictionary definition of phenomenon at Wiktionary
Quotations related to Phenomenon at Wikiquote
Media related to Phenomena at Wikimedia Commons

then it displays like this:

The dictionary definition of phenomenon at Wiktionary Quotations related to Phenomenon at Wikiquote Media related to Phenomena at Wikimedia Commons

It's covered by WP:LINEBREAK. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:09, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

I wonder why two out of these three tell you to use bullet points in the template doc but one doesn't. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 03:47, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Proposed interim gadget : mobileUndo

Its been around two months since I put together the mobileUndo script (a script which allows reversion while using the mobile interface), currently around 25 people use it. I think it should be added as a gadget until the WMF implements this feature in its Advanced mobile contributions roll out. I feel that users who use the default mobile interface to edit Wikipedia on mobile (or for that matter anybody who uses the MinervaNeue skin) will benefit from using this script. << FR ^(mobileUndo) 08:24, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

For those who want to test the script, the installation instructions are here << FR ^(mobileUndo) 03:39, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Support, per Nominator. This is a good idea that has been tested. I can't see a reason why not to !vote support. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 16:57, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Would be closing this in favor in T minus 48 hrs. Does not seem remotely controversial.∯WBG^converse 18:04, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Page Deletion: User:Steeve815

Resolved

Dear Wikipedia's administrators,
Please help me deleting my user page. I don't think I'll be usable.
Thanks, Steeve815 (talk) 19:27, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Done by User:Writ Keeper --DannyS712 (talk) 19:33, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Conditional column

I have two tables, each 20em wide, one following the other (vertically). If there is enough room on the user's display (i.e. if it is more than about 42em), I'd like to put the second table beside the first instead of below it. I tried {{Col-break}} etc., hoping that it might be smart enough to move the second column below, but it just leaves it there and the user has to scroll right. Is there some magic to do this?

Table 1

Table 1
Foo	Bar
Lorem ipsum	dolor sit amet,
consectetur	adipiscing

Table 2

Table 2
Moo	Boo
Duis aute irure	dolor in
reprehenderit in	voluptate

—[AlanM1(talk)]— 18:50, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

If the second table doesn't have a section heading then you can use style="display: inline-table;" per Help:Table#Positioning:

Table 1
Foo	Bar
Lorem ipsum	dolor sit amet,
consectetur	adipiscing

Table 2
Moo	Boo
Duis aute irure	dolor in
reprehenderit in	voluptate

PrimeHunter (talk) 19:09, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Very nice. Works with divs, too, including section headers.

—[AlanM1(talk)]— 20:12, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

All images broken?

Whenever I check a page on Wikipedia - or, for that matter, on any Wikimedia site, such as the Commons - the images do not display. Just a broken link. I've tried using multiple different browsers and no fewer than three physical devices (a laptop, a desktop, and a cellphone), all of which appear to have the same issue.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this or not, but is this happening to anyone else? Gimubrc (talk) 17:07, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Happening to me also103.215.54.84 (talk) 17:08, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

~~Me too.~~ Seems to be working now. Adam9007 (talk) 17:09, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

~~Still out of order for me...~~ I erased my browser's cache and cookies (everything over the past hour) and it fixed the problem. If anyone else is having issues, that should fix it.Gimubrc (talk) 17:13, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Caused by a configuration error, see https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/2019-02-11-upload-cache-failure for preliminary details with a full analysis coming soon. —AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 17:43, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

But, it's not Thursday. It's only Monday :(. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 17:51, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

"Config changes don't ride the train." And if that opaque statement doesn't mean more to you than it did to me, when I first heard it, then you may be interested in seeing the whole calendar at wikitech:Deployments. There's a chance for something to go wrong most days of the week. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:16, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

There is now an incident report on this at wikitech:Incident documentation/20190211-varnish. the wub "?!" 21:47, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

SQL query requests

Wikidata has a wonderful forum Request a query where volunteers create SPARQL queries by request. It has never failed me within a day or less and is super helpful. Is there something like this for SQL such as for Quarry queries? -- GreenC 18:21, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Where you would expect, and I believe it enjoys an interwiki link with the WD page. Feel free to advertise elsewhere :^). --Izno (talk) 18:27, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

OH thanks! -- GreenC 18:30, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Izno, TIL, thanks! Watchlisted! SQL ^{Query me!} 00:26, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Failing "request an account" process

The process at these places is failing.

A notice at the first link says that the backlog is 2 months. The ideal turnaround is instant.

For those who need an orientation to the "request an account" service, it is useful for users who want to edit from a blocked IP address. Commonly these are shared IP addresses, such as at schools, community centers, parks, libraries, or large commercial buildings with shared wifi like some business complexes or malls. To support these people we can either coach them through removing an IP block - which usually is not possible or useful - or we can somehow get them an account.

The request an account process is supposed to be higher security than registering a Wikimedia account in the usual way. Currently it requires an email address. If we wanted more assurances then we could set up a registration process which asked for more.

I think this process needs to become automated. There are not many human volunteers who want to do this process, the talk page there is dead, this must be boring to review, and I am not able to see in the guide at Wikipedia:Request_an_account/Guide that there review aspects which a human has to do and automation cannot do.

Thoughts from others? Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:57, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

It's not easy to automate validation that requested usernames meet the username policy. It's not easy to automatically parse any comments from users who are requesting accounts. Most of the checks are automatable in a pass/fail manner, and we do have work in progress to improve that, currently blocked on a code review. We also have work in progress to do creations via OAuth, which should also increase the speed we can reach (again, blocked by code review). The truth of the matter is that probably 50-75% of requests we get will fail one of the automated checks, mostly blocks, recent contributions, multiple requests from one email or IP address - all of these need manual review. WP:ACC is meant to be the human review after the automated filters on the main on-wiki signup form have rejected; for that reason I'm fairly strongly against adding automated rejection of requests without human validation to ACC. This isn't helped by our general lack of people able to spend time working through the backlog. stwalkerster (talk) 13:46, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

It's also worth me noting that the talk page is indeed fairly dead, because most of the discussions we have are centred around specific requests or general policies, and tend to happen either on IRC or the mailing list due to the nature of the topics they contain. stwalkerster (talk) 13:46, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Stwalkerster, time permitting of course, I will see if I can knock away some of that backlog. —CYBERPOWER (Be my Valentine) 14:35, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

I also forgot - checking the global rename log is also not automatable at the moment, pending phab:T193671. stwalkerster (talk) 20:32, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

@Stwalkerster: Okay, you have a lot of insight on this. I agree, the talk page would not matter because discussion happens in semi-private with no easily accessible record. Can you answer these questions briefly, and make your best guesses if you do not know the answer? I am making some guesses to start.

How long does it take a human to review one of these requests? 2 minutes?
How many requests are there a month? 100?
What is the community base for addressing this queue? 10 people?
How long does it take a human to learn to do evaluations in this queue? 2 hours?
Under what circumstances could this queue get backlogged further?
Is there anything I can do to encourage prioritizing the code review? Like for example, posting a link to this conversation somewhere or to someone?

Thanks @Cyberpower678: <3 happy valentines Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:08, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Bluerasberry, Point 1 - 2 mins for a really easy request, maybe 30 mins max for a more difficult request. I've had some that have spanned multiple days while I discuss the matter with the blocking admin.

The present backlog is appx 3000 requests, at 2 months. So, the answer to point 2 is 1500 at this time, but going up.

Going by the IRC logs, I'd say the answer to point 3 is... "not many" :( 5-10 perhaps. We've all got our specialties and interests, mine is mostly to deal with the proxy queue.

To point 4, yeah - about 2 hours reading, and a couple more hours hands-on sounds about right.

Point 5....More requests?

To point 6, apparently the code review is with FastLizard4 as of nearly 2 years ago. It's been a long time since I started ACC, and I'm not sure I understand why that this is a point of failure spanning multiple years. SQL ^{Query me!} 00:38, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Bluerasberry, new ACC users can take anywhere from 2-10 minutes to assess a request. Veteran users can work as quickly as 10 seconds. My fastest time on a request is about 20 seconds. —CYBERPOWER (Be my Valentine) 01:33, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

In my humble opinion, a great non-technical way to reduce the backlog would be to stop making the recommendation for ACC so prominent. You'll see this recommendation at Help:I have been blocked, Template:Schoolblock, Template:Anonblock, Template:Rangeblock and various other places. Once upon a time we used to basically advise the user to find another IP address. ACC is a useful service but let's be honest hardly anyone is stuck on a single IP or range and unable to create an account on their own. People go to ACC because they think it's the recommended method, but in most cases it isn't. Incidentally this is a principle I'd also apply to OTRS, UTRS, functionaries, and various other places where things often get needlessly kicked. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 00:31, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Bluerasberry: responses inline:

How long does it take a human to review one of these requests? 2 minutes? It entirely depends on who is doing it, and also on the specific request. Newbies to ACC would probably take in the region of 3-4 minutes for a simple request, more experienced users will probably take less than a minute per request. Wrinkles like AntiSpoof hits, blocks, multiple requests from the same IP, edits, talk page content, etc just adds time.

How many requests are there a month? 100? You're out by an order of magnitude. It's somewhere between 1000 on a quiet month to 2500 on a busy month, and recently it's been veering towards the upper end of that range - probably as more things have started pointing to ACC in that time.

What is the community base for addressing this queue? 10 people? There's more than 10 with access, but in practice there's been about 15 people handling requests in the last month

How long does it take a human to learn to do evaluations in this queue? 2 hours? That's hard to quantify - somewhere between 15 minutes of reading the guide and a few years of experience.

Under what circumstances could this queue get backlogged further? People not spending more time working on the queue? It's currently growing...

Is there anything I can do to encourage prioritizing the code review? Like for example, posting a link to this conversation somewhere or to someone? Not really unfortunately. Those who we need the sign-off from are already on it. stwalkerster (talk) 00:33, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

New gadget that adds "Read Now" buttons to book references

Hey guys, I have been working with Internet Archive to produce a gadget that adds Read Now links next to book references. This allows readers to quickly click through to the books without having to find a library that has it. For the missing books, users are presented with a Donate button should they wish to donate what's needed to make the book available online. I'm currently asking the community two questions. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 18:04, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Comment: People can try the gadget first right now. Just add importScript('User:Cyberpower678/IABooks.js'); to your common.js page as explained at Wikipedia:User_scripts#Full_manual_instructions. The working demo code is at User:Cyberpower678/IABooks.js. Thanks! Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 04:31, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Question 1: Given the potential usefulness to readers, should this be made into a gadget that can be enabled in preferences?

Question 2: Should the donate button have an opt-out method, ie should the gadget allow for the ability to suppress the donate buttons?

Users can test this gadget by adding importScript('User:Reinischmax/IABooks.js'); to their JS file.

Also I'm pinging Fuzheado and Ocaasi—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 18:04, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Input (New Gadget Proposal)

Hi there, see images to the right of what this looks like. I've got a bunch of concerns (but not so much 'technical' concerns so this probably needs a wider venue than VPT).
- First major (non-technical) concern - running in-article fundraiser advertisements for archive.org: OUCH. Even if a reader were to click on the ad, go there, pay - there is no way to know what happens next (specifically - when will they get access to their source?).
  - Interesting... I never thought of asking people to donate $ to pay for books we would digitize and make available, including as linked from Wikipedia articles, as "advertisements" but I can now see how that may be the case. We actually suggested two options... donate $ or donate books. Do you think it would be OK if we dropped the request for $ but kept the request/opportunity for people who have "missing" books to donate them to us so we can digitize them and make them available? User:Markjgraham hmb 06:12, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
  - Technical issue here: these off-site links are embedding logged in usernames to the GET request - which would empower the third party to be able to correlate our editors accounts to their ip addresses - creating a privacy concern.
- The "Read Now" links don't seem to actually take the reader to the source material - when trying the links so far I've ended up at the following results: (1) a message telling me the source isn't available, asking me to register off-site and get on a 'waitlist'; (2) landing at a "limited preview" where again I'm being prompted to register off-site. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:24, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
  Xaosflux, Can you provide an article with a Read Now button where case number 1 is happening? That shouldn't be happening. Also for the privacy concern, you are right. I thought nothing of it during implementation, but it will be removed in the next few minutes. It will no longer pass your username. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:18, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
  @Cyberpower678: my examples were found in the first few hits on Analysis of variance. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:21, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
  Xaosflux, Thanks for that. Books shouldn't require an account generally, so this will be investigated. Also usernames are no longer passed in GET requests now. Thanks for bringing that up. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:29, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
I have the same concerns as Xaosflux, especially regarding privacy (I doubt the WMF would be happy there), which would especially apply for a default gadget (no opting-in to have your data exposed to the Internet Archive); there are more concerns with privacy since the Internet Archive is also getting what page someone is visiting - is able to track people per IP.
- Thank you for flagging this concern. We are happy to not get user data or IP Numbers.User:Markjgraham hmb 06:04, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
I have other concerns too: The script takes far too long to load (5+ seconds), and when it loads is disrupts the references somewhat - the buttons are far too large. Additionally, the images may violate WP:NFCC (similar issues around fair use arise even though NFCC is written for images uploaded), and we should not really be loading things from another website.
- Instead, the "read now" links should be changed to "read on archive.org" and made into a simple, regular link to the book page added at the end of the reference - that would be a lot nicer, and would make the links similarly prominent to say the archive.org or google books links we already commonly include. If someone is looking at a reference and wants to read the book, they don't need a big button to see the option of going to archive.org.
- This would also allow dropping the dependency on OOUI.core, which is not loaded on articles by default and adds a a reasonable amount of KBs to a page load.
  - Great suggestions. The "Read Now" button was meant to be a placeholder. I think a link as you suggest would be better. User:Markjgraham hmb
- The initial query to https://archive.org/services/context/books?url= itself appears to take a long time and is possibly the main reason for how long the script takes to show the links, in addition to violating the content security policy of the WMF.
  - This could probably be made faster by only sending the generated list of ISBNs of books, so the entire page doesn't have to be read by the Internet Archive website.
So yeah, there are quite a few concerns here. The concerns are not as relevant if this is a user script that is installed by editors rather than readers, who say could benefit from the ability to relatively easily read book references when reviewing GAs and FAs and so on. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:37, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
Galobtter, The GET requests no longer pass a username. When it was implemented, we failed to consider the tracking by IP aspect of it. Since Internet Archive also takes privacy seriously, I have promptly removed passing the username. Donations are now anonymous.

As for the load time issues, it's being worked on. Enterprisey will be helping us on that front as they have volunteered. The devs are reading your suggestions and will work on improving the gadgets. The primary goal is doing a service to Wikipedia's readers, so they appreciate your input. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Galobtter, Regarding dropping the OOUI.core dependency: that is used to make the popups that display the archive's book information. I was looking for alternative ways like jquery UI and bootstrap, but these aren't supported. It's probably worth discussing whether the popups are necessary, and also what the best way to implement them would be. Reinischmax (talk) 20:11, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
I think I may have forgotten to mention but I did mean removing the popups when I talked about dropping the dependency. Galobtter (pingó mió) 20:13, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm feeling dumb. Why does archive.org think it's okay to digitize and subsequently 'archive' these books? --Izno (talk) 19:00, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
Izno, to make them more readily available to the public as best as legally possible, especially when it comes to older, harder to obtain books. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:05, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Izno, see https://controlleddigitallending.org —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:07, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
And the brief statement: Only those books out of copyright? Or also those in? --Izno (talk) 19:15, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
Izno, all books, including copyrighted ones, are being archived. The Internet Archive is creating a digital library that very much acts like a real library but with digital books. It will allow people to check out books, and it will only allow as many checkouts of a book as the number of copies they have of the book. It's pretty much all explained in the link I mentioned above. CDL is legal under copyright law when implemented correctly. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 22:18, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
Fascinating. But how many books are currently available at Internet Archive -- not counting old PD books that will seldom be used in actual articles as references? If relatively few, then this just becomes a giant donation drive which would need WMF approval. Renata (talk) 11:41, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
About 4 million books with full text, with a peak in frequency around 2006 it seems. Nemo 21:39, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps worth noting that the Internet Archive has recently (two weeks ago) been served cease-and-desists notices from the Authors Guild (U.S.) and Society of Authors (U.K.) over this service (report). Not sure how far we should be promoting it, particularly not with quite so prominent bright green high-visibility blocks of colour. Jheald (talk) 15:54, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

When it comes to copyright, Wikimedia and the Internet Archive are really miles apart. The latter is often pushing the border to make it fairer for individuals to consume content (a position with which I strongly agree). But the Wikimedia foundation is extremely careful not to violate any copyright law. I don't think WMF council would be comfortable with links to sources that are legally challenged. - kosboot (talk) 14:22, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Wouldn't get too carried away about Authors Guild lawsuits, they have a habit of loosing. See Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. -- the Court found and upheld on appeal that "display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair use". And in Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, "the court concludes that all uses of the copyrighted works by the HDL are fair use." Also it appears the lawsuit concerns lending complete digital copies to library patrons, while this service concerns a "limited preview" akin to what Google Books and Haithi do with snippets. -- GreenC 15:57, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

On that, see https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190128/17205941481/authors-guild-attacks-libraries-lending-digital-books.shtml Nemo 17:01, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

First, thank you to the developers working on this. Next...before you go anywhere else with this, please consult WMF Legal and the Security team to find out their position on this. If they are okay with this and are willing to post their support onwiki....then and only then is it time to have a community discussion about whether or not the English Wikipedia community supports this addition. I don't want to load the script, so for those who have, does that "donate" button take one to a donation solicitation from Internet Archive? If yes...well, I have real issues with that. If no...then change the label on the button right away, even before sending it to Legal/Security. Risker (talk) 20:25, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
- @Risker: it takes you to https://www.archive.org/donate? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:59, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
  - Thanks, Xaosflux. On that basis, I think it's objectionable that Wikipedia would be promoting another NGO when our community has already expressed concern about donor fatigue when it comes to asking for donations to *our own* NGO. Don't get me wrong: I support, use and donate to the Internet Archive myself. But if I was confronted with a dozen "donate" buttons, I'd probably never donate again. I think it would have an adverse effect on Wikipedia donors and donations as well. We don't even allow "Donate to Wikipedia" buttons on this project, except for carefully organized and scheduled fundraising campaigns. We just have one clickable "Donate to Wikipedia" line in the left-hand navigation bar. Risker (talk) 01:34, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
The address provided assumes that one is in USA. It's not clear to me what's the benefit of having an identical button repeated N times. How much less effective would it be to just have a static "Search and read now" link which merely searched openlibrary.org and lets the third party website suggest the user what to do next (browse, read snippets, borrow, buy, donate or whatever)? Nemo 21:32, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
@Nemo bis, Risker, Xaosflux, GreenC, and Galobtter: Taking the input into account, the big buttons have been replaced by subtle links that click straight through to the book. The OOUI dependency has been removed and the load times are now improved. With the popups removed, the gadget is no longer loading images from external sites. The links now read "[Read on archive.org]". Please continue to provide input as this is very useful and helpful.—CYBERPOWER (Be my Valentine) 00:16, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
Comment Can we do away with any sort of donate link ? Instead leave it empty or add a message explaining that no preview is available. << FR ^(mobileUndo) 16:19, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Adding weblinks with special characters in source text editor

Hello everybody! How come the source text editor (apparently in all the Wikis!) is still not able to convert URLs of Wiki sites into valid Wiki links, as soon as the former include special characters (for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F → ß)? When clicking , entering the URL, and selecting Insert link, it says: "The URL you specified looks like it was intended as a link to another wiki page. Do you want to make it an internal link?" However, upon selecting Internal link, the following error message occurs: "The requested page title contains invalid characters". Has this issue already been dealt with in the past? If yes, why hasn't it been fixed by now? (If no – since I am not at all familiar with reporting errors to Phabricator –, would somebody competent be willing to bring it up there?) Thank you in advance for any assistance. Best wishes--Hildeoc (talk) 11:36, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

When making internal wikilinks, I don't copypaste URLs. I go to the top of the page, and copy the page title, and paste that in between the double square brackets. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:47, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Thank you very much for commenting. Of course you're definitely on the safe side by proceeding that way. However, I wondered whether it couln't be possible to improve that

function as to the above issue, since it's been included in the editor toolbar for quite some time now.--Hildeoc (talk) 16:11, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Hildeoc, it does for me.. Which browser are you using ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:17, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Thanks for your interest! I use Firefox Quantum. Best wishes,--Hildeoc (talk) 20:23, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

PS: @Redrose64 and TheDJ: Note: Unfortunately, the software is apparently also still not even intelligent enough to convert URLS to Wiki sites without special characters, but only consisting of more than one term – and thus including underscores as delimiters – into regular Wiki links without underscores ... Has this ever been discussed yet?--Hildeoc (talk) 17:52, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

PPS: @Redrose64 and TheDJ: Note: Also, it cannot identify redirects, and label them as such – as this happens, in contrast, with dabs. Same question here: Has the community already come across that issue as well?--Hildeoc (talk) 21:47, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

VisualEditor (visual and wikitext modes) can do that, and I'm sure that it wouldn't have been built to do that if editors hadn't been wanting those features. I don't expect them to be added to the 2010 mw:WikiEditor, assuming that's the mw:editor you're using. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@Hildeoc: Tried to figure out what you did, and why you get the result you do. You say "selecting Insert link" so I assume you talking about the dialog in the 2010 WikiEditor. That dialog is not smart enough, and I don't know if anyone will put more work into it, making it work in the proposed way. The VisualEditor and WikitextEditor do recognize such links, and in VisualEditor you can simply paste the link straight into the editor and it will show up as a formatted link.
Your idea is sound though, and similar functionality should work the same way whatever editor you use. Jeblad (talk) 20:50, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@Jeblad: Thank you very much for commenting! Yes, precisely, I mean the 2010 WikiEditor (which is where I get by clicking on "Edit source" here). Just for reasons of clarity: What exactly are you referring to by "Wikitext editor" then?--Hildeoc (talk) 20:35, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

@Hildeoc: WikitextEditor is also referred to as mw:2017 wikitext editor. It will recognize links in some dialogs, but it won't recognize them pasted into the text like VisualEditor. Jeblad (talk) 21:18, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Collapse navbox for specific article

Is it possible to make a navbox appear in collapsed form on a specific article, even though there is only one navbox on the page and the navbox itself is set to autocollapse (i.e. when two or more on a page)? ClippednPinned (talk) 20:49, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

@ClippednPinned: Sure, its the state parameter. What article? --DannyS712 (talk) 20:56, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

You can set it to |state=collapsed collapsed. Ruslik_Zero 20:57, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks ClippednPinned (talk) 09:48, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

cite error

I get a cite error in the Matthew Whitaker article that I can't understand. As far as I can see the ref in quesion is defined. Can someone please help out? Could there be some invisible character involved?

Cite error: The named reference vladek was invoked but never defined

Thanks in advance.

HandsomeFella (talk) 21:18, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Fixed. Someone commented out the paragraph containing the full reference, so the self-closed reference didn't work. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:29, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Which is one of the reasons I put the full citations ("reference" is rather ambiguous) into their own section. Even if folks insist on using named-refs, having the master "references" in their own section removes a point of possible breakage. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:42, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Permission error?? Bug???

I'm an admin. When I went to restore a couple of deleted pages just now (an action I've performed a number of times during my centuries of adminship), User:Flooded with them hundreds/1.js and User:Flooded with them hundreds/common.js, I repeatedly got permission errors: "You do not have permission to view a page's deleted history, for the following reason: The action you have requested is limited to users in one of the groups: Administrators, Oversighters, Researchers, Checkusers." I was logged in to my normal, admin, account. (I know Bishzilla gets permission errors..) And when I went experimentally to view a user's deleted contributions, there was no problem; apparently I'm admin enough for that. What gives? Bug? Some special issue with those two pages? If somebody would like to help with the restoration of the pages, please give the reason "user request". But most of all I'd like to understand what went wrong, and to have it stop doing it. Bishonen | talk 10:02, 16 February 2019 (UTC).

Only interface admins can restore CSS and JS pages. The interface message is wrong. (T203083) — JJMC89 (T·C) 10:06, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Aha. Thank you. It would be great if someone corrected the message. Meanwhile, the user has requested undeletion of those pages, and there is no problem with it that I can see, so perhaps an interface admin would like to help? Bishonen | talk 10:10, 16 February 2019 (UTC).

(edit conflict)Pages restored - All admins are equal, but some are more equal than others. Because of phab:T202989, admins cannot see the deleted history of JS and CSS pages, and because of bugs with error messages, mediawiki assumes that you're not an admin if you can't see the deleted history (thus the error message that claims you're not an admin). Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:13, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks very much, Galobtter. Bishonen | talk 11:28, 16 February 2019 (UTC).

Bug: player overlaps music score display (css problem?)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T216305

View Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Bug: player overlaps music score display (css problem?) in the skin:

As you can see above, with default Vector skin (and most others) <score vorbis = "1"> shows the player overlapping several pixels over the score image. On en.m.wikipedia.org or with Modern skin everything shows correctly. Seems like a problem with css styles. Please help. --M5 (talk) 22:09, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

@M5: I've opened phab:T216305 for this issue to be worked on, it shouldn't require localization of css to not be broken, also fails on testwiki. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:13, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

I've added a set of skin links so that others may be checked easily. I find that in Modern it's fine; in Cologne Blue it's just acceptable; but in MonoBook, Timeless and Vector it has the undesirable overlap. Why do section links not work in MinervaNeue?

Anyway, part of the problem seems to be that the height of the player changes as it loads (it starts off as a dark strip, then changes to a spinny thing, then to a paler strip which is taller than the original dark strip), but whilst the containing box changes its height to compensate, the second change is not far enough. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:51, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Twinkle (old version)

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Twinkle (redux)

Weird warning

Hi all, I was trying to add the following text to my user page under "Searches"

*"Virendra Singh Patyal" {{Search|"Virendra Singh Patyal"|long=y}} - Feb 2019 - See {{noping|Saims243}}, a sock of {{noping|Sscomputers201}}

(It helps me search for problematic stuff)

I got the following error message: Your edit was not saved because it contains a new external link to a site registered on Wikipedia's blacklist.

The text below said: The following link has triggered a protection filter: britannica.com/search?query

But I don't see any part of that link on my user page, so I'm unclear on what the error was about. Help? Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 17:26, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: worked for me could you try again? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:01, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: I just tested it myself and got the same error. I took a screenshot and highlighted the relevant part, see here. @Xaosflux: the reason you didn't trigger the filter is because you only edited the section, and the link is not in that section. I got it to trigger by trying to edit the whole page. I have no idea why that site is blacklisted, though. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 18:16, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
- No, it is the code itself which adds the link. {{Search|long=yes}} produces a link to https://www.britannica.com/search?query=. Xaosflux added the code inside a source comment so the template wasn't called in his edit. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:31, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I copied and pasted Xaosflux's edit text, and did so in the same spot. AFAIK, the only thing I did differently was edit the whole page instead of the section. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 18:52, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

OK, so \bbritannica\.com/search\?query is on the global spam blacklist (meta:Spam blacklist). — xaosflux ^Talk 18:18, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
Options, we could add it to the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, or someone could request it be removed from the GSB. @Billinghurst: may have some more info on this one. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:20, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
~~Also, Cyphoidbomb could remove those direct links from the page (seems to be OK to use the template only). — xaosflux ^Talk 18:25, 14 February 2019 (UTC)~~ (The template also causes the hit - we could change the template to not use that search if it isn't useful anymore — xaosflux ^Talk 18:35, 14 February 2019 (UTC))

Billinghurst added it in [19] and posted to meta:Talk:Spam blacklist/Archives/2018-09#spambot regexes to blacklist (September 5). Somebody was apparently using a spambot to add such links at the time. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:49, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
I think we should request whitelisting of that link. I have no idea how it could be used for spam in a manner that any link couldn't be used. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 18:52, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
The use of numbers of popular sites with search capacity utilised a regular spambot trick to make posts/edits look reasonable (almost like greylisting for the eyeball), especially with spambot user pages. I would tread warily in running around declaring its addition irrelevant. Similarly there has been some who think that adding search type links to articles is another winning idea, which it isn't for our encyclopaedia. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:42, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

@Billinghurst:Do you think you could expound upon that answer in more detail, please? I'm a software developer myself, but I've always shied away from web development and administration, so I'm not really grasping what you're saying here. You can reply at my talk page to avoid going off topic here. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 23:30, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Suggestion, just change the module to insert an empty factor, eg. http://britannica.com/search?ct=&query=anything works quite well, and gets us around the issue. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:50, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
@Billinghurst: thanks for the note, I've updated the module that powers that template, if anyone has any trouble let me know or just revert. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:14, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I haven't experienced the problem again, so I suppose this has been resolved. Thanks to all involved! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 16:35, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Labs is down

https://tools.wmflabs.org/ is down (500 - Internal Server Error). It's been down since about 03:00 UTC. Does anybody know what's going on? Thanks, — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 05:55, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

There are various issues, including multiple hardware failures, impacting Toolforge, ToolsDB, and other Cloud VPS instances. See phab:T216208 and mailarchive:cloud/2019-February/000548.html as well as other related tasks and emails. Expect poor performance for at least the next 24 hours. — JJMC89 (T·C) 06:32, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Update: The issues will likely not be resolved until Tuesday at the earliest. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 17:36, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

IABot ascribing edits to wrong account

Why is InternetArchiveBot ascribing edits like this to my old account, Noyster? When invoking the bot I am logged in using my present account, which is: Bhunacat10 (talk), 13:24, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Bhunacat10, log out and log back in to the tool. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 13:48, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, but I'm simply making these edits through Page history|Fix dead links and no instruction is met with about logging out & in so that one's present account name will be shown as responsible for the edit: Bhunacat10 (talk), 13:55, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Also log in and out of wiki with your old account to destroy all sessions that could be linked to a cookie. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:30, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Bhunacat10, when you initially use the tool, you were prompted to login first. Go to the tool, in the upper right you should see your name. Go there and click Logout on the drop down menu. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:27, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Bhunacat10, BTW, why didn't just get yourself renamed? —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:43, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Issues with infobox and sidebar

I have encountered issues with Template:Civil conflict sidebar and Template:Infobox civil conflict. Please see Montgomery bus boycott for examples of issues. The issue with the "Civil conflict sidebar" template is a missing white border along the right side of the box. The issue with the "Infobox civil conflict" template is located within the "Parties to the civil conflict" section of the template. The right column bullet points are the wrong color (suppose to be a blue-ish color) and have crossed into the left column. Mitchumch (talk) 07:08, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Fixed. The combination of tables and div tags and bullet lists resulted in sensitivity to line breaks. I believe that I have fixed the "non-blue bullets" problem and a couple of other alignment problems in Template:Infobox civil conflict. I don't see any problems with the sidebar. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:04, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Self-trout (...and somehow in the process, I transcluded the sandbox version of the Infobox into Montgomery bus boycott. Sorry about that, and thanks to the ubiquitous Redrose64 for catching my mistake.) – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:37, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Jonesey95 Thank you for fixing the "Infobox civil conflict" template. For the sidebar, there used to be a white border around the entire blue-ish colored box. Is there anything I can do to restore that attribute on the right side of the template? Mitchumch (talk) 19:55, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Something out of whack with Template:Infobox U.S. Cabinet

{{Infobox U.S. Cabinet}} is employed on pages dealing with US presidents. At the pages I've checked—Franklin D. Roosevelt (where I first noticed it), George H. W. Bush, and Abraham Lincoln—names of cabinet members are displayed out of chronological order when the raw text entries are in order. In January, the problem was noted at Template_talk:Infobox_U.S._Cabinet#View_problems without a response so far. Can someone here shed light on the problem? Dhtwiki (talk) 19:29, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

The error is easy to see at Template:Infobox cabinet members/doc, where each set of names at the right is ordered a/c/e/b/d. I think this is related to the 21 September 2018 edits to Module:Infobox cabinet members, so this might be one for Frietjes (talk · contribs). -- John of Reading (talk) 20:42, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Please reply at the original thread, Template_talk:Infobox_U.S._Cabinet#View_problems. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:59, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Fixed – This problem now seems fixed, at least with regard to my issue. The main discussion took place on the template talk page; the code fix was made here. Dhtwiki (talk) 22:41, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Proxy filter blocking a URL

The proxy filter is blocking this URL from being added to a mainspace page:

http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/InfoWeb?p_action=doc&p_topdoc=1&p_docnum=1&p_sort=YMD_date:D&p_product=AWNB&p_text_direct-0=document_id=(%20127A2C205DF7A568%20)&p_docid=127A2C205DF7A568&p_theme=aggdocs&p_queryname=127A2C205DF7A568&f_openurl=yes&p

It's not a proxy URL, or is it? -- GreenC 21:31, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@GreenC: "infoweb.newsbank.com" is the hit on that filter. It was added by @Beetstra: a couple of weeks ago. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:35, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Also FWIW, that link doesn't go to any actual content for those of us on the normal public internet... — xaosflux ^Talk 21:40, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Ok great, I'll delete them. Editors will often try to hide blacklisted URLs behind web shortened URLs (eg. webcitation.org) but my bot keeps finding them when it expands the URL to long form and then is blocked trying to upload. -- GreenC 21:41, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@GreenC: FWIW, I've exempted bots from that filter since they are still operating correctly - even though the links are of little use. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:46, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@Beetstra and Xaosflux: That filter has got to go, or at least be made more specific. NewsBank URL's work perfectly fine if you know how to export them. For example: https://infoweb.newsbank.com/resources/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_dat=document_id%3Anews%252F0F6DAD8C9AE71B1B&rft_id=info%3Asid%2Finfoweb.newsbank.com&rft_val_format=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Actx&svc_dat=AWNB&req_dat=1028A39C75C2B899. (For any NewsBank users reading this, you go to Export in the toolbar, then Export Article Links, and copy the OpenURL link.) Toohool (talk) 01:05, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

@Toohool: the urls that I ran into were all useless proxies and therefore I assumed this was the same problem as it was in the same set. I see that we need to be more specific. Is it the /iw-search/ path that is the only one we should not use? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 05:03, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

@Beetstra: Looking through the LinkSearch results, even blocking the /iw-search path is too strict. Some of those links work fine. It seems to be those that have a "f_openurl" parameter that work. There are also a lot of links with paths that start with /resources/doc/nb that only seem to work if you're already logged in to NewsBank, but that's a valid use case (those links should just be flagged as subscription-only). Toohool (talk) 05:48, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

@Toohool: I have removed the newsbank part for now. I saw an editor who performed 10-15 edits, and many of those were clear proxies. Also these links did not work for me (see the first link above - no content, no information as to what it is supposed to link to), so I added these in the same go. Maybe I was mistaken on this one, or we need to be way more specific (we could consider to update the warning: MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-proxy-link to reflect your instructions). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 06:06, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Bot request

I have currently made a request in the page Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Adithyakbot. I would like to know whether I can edit the whole topic present in that page. The doubt arises due to the reason that I have 'submitted' a request.Adithyak1997 (talk) 14:44, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

You can edit that page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:26, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

@Adithyak1997: and until you transclude it to Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval it isn't really "submitted" yet anyway. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:50, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata inverse property in Lua

I've been playing around with a module to extract Wikidata less painfully. For example {{#invoke:Sandbox/Certes|page_property|Persian cat|instance of}} produces "cat breed". (Some inputs produce a list of multiple values; I picked a simple example.) I'm using entity:formatPropertyValues(property) from mw:Extension:Wikibase Client/Lua. Is there any way to detect this relationship from the other end, so that I can write {{...|inverse_page_property|Cat breed|instance of}} to display "Abyssinian, ..., Persian cat, ..."? I can do this in WQDS with SPARQL, but it would be useful to have access to it in a template, either directly or via a Lua module. Certes (talk) 19:53, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't think there is. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 19:55, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Watchlist/mediawiki problem

I have just started experiencing a problem where updating my watchlist hangs while reading www.mediawiki.org. And when I stop it, I get the basic html format. This is at least partly a problem with my old Firefox browser, as it doesn't happen with my Chromium browser. But it didn't use to happen with Firefox. I haven't explicitly made any changes to my browser or system configuration, or WP personal preferences (but sometimes Strange Stuff Happens?). It started in the middle of a session (i.e., not upon logging in). I had just added some pages to my watchlist; removing a bunch of pages has not remedied the problem. Any ideas as to what is going on here? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:21, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem with Safari 12.0.3. — fourthords | =Λ= | 23:45, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

@J. Johnson and Fourthords: can you try the Safe Mode Watchlist? — xaosflux ^Talk 23:56, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I still get a never-ending ellipsis undulation. — fourthords | =Λ= | 23:58, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Likewise. A slight amendment of the problem statement: while Chromium displays a properly formatted watchlist, the little worm keeps chasing its tail, but while reading en.wikipedia.org (not mediawiki.org). Which is the same behavior I get using Safemode, except that Firefox does not display the watchlist until I stop the transfer, and then it does "basic". ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:46, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Well... The problem seems to have gone away. Don't know if it had anything do with having just rebooted the computer. (Don't usually have to do that, as I don't have run Windows.) ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 03:48, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

This often means that the Wikimedia servers are slow to return a CSS or JavaScript file, so when your browser eventually times out from waiting, it displays what it can - which may well be unstyled as a consequence of the missing CSS/JS. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:34, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

And the problem is back. What you say makes some sense, especially this morning, as the local networking seems to be congested. But at least one additional factor is involved, as Chromium, which consistently formats the watchlist, is still waiting for something else, even after an hour. Also, I see the problem only with my watchlist; not with contributions, large articles, or anywhere else. And (aside from late last night, when I rebooted) Firefox is persistently affected, whereas if the servers were the main problem I would expect more variation in the course of the day. The problem occurrence was definitely not seen (at least, not for a long time), and now is persistently seen. The transition was around 22:00 (UTC) on 10 February. Were there any server changes around then? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:01, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

FWIW, I still have no watchlist functionality. Just a forever-pulsing elipsis. — fourthords | =Λ= | 23:34, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Our notification process has demonstrated inexplicable behavior

I am perplexed by the selective nature of our notifications process regarding this recent posting. Therein, I "mentioned" two editors (without an attributable error) yet: only one notification was delivered, and the other, inexplicably, was not.[20] Please enlighten me if it can be explained, or assist in reporting if, instead, it's a "bug". Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 23:55, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Could it be because the text you removed also mentioned one of the editors? The one with a net increase in mentions got pinged; the other didn't. Certes (talk) 00:16, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Certes. That is a reasonable assumption and most likely will bear out the cause. It might even be trivial to those "in the know"? But I don't think it comports with mainstay expectations regardless of cognitive skill.--John Cline (talk) 02:16, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Pinged out of the blue

Why did Special:Diff/883844394 made by SwagGangster ping me?—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 00:54, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps because it accidentally transcluded an entire talk page on which you had been mentioned. Certes (talk) 01:07, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

You didn't say which type of ping it was. The transcluded page Talk:Viggo Mortensen had two links to User:Cyberpower678/FaQs#InternetArchiveBot but a subpage link should not produce a mention notification. Was it a notification that a page you created had been linked? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:27, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

PrimeHunter, it was a mention to my email. Most likely my bot was pinged. I get emails when someone mentions IABot. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 03:16, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Cyberpower678 That was my fault, I pinged 22 users because I accidentally transcluded the article on the Talk Page. 😅 SwagGangster ^• 03:22, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

SwagGangster, lol —CYBERPOWER (Around) 03:26, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Back to fighting the endless round of vandalism I go. SwagGangster ^• 03:37, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Why do user JS/CSS files always come back with max-age=0?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T71460

Every time a visit a page, everything I import with mw.loader.load() or importScript() comes back with:

Cache-Control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate

This forces Firefox to wait for whole lot of pointless HTTP 304 responses before the scripts can run. Adding &maxage=86400&smaxage=86400 to the request doesn't work, either. It seems Varnish has been set up to strip it right back out.

Is this a bug, or a feature? I found phab:T71460, but it's been open since 2014, and I'm not following Krinkle's last comment, nor do I understand why it's gone stale. Gadgets are cached for 30 days, by comparison! I'd think the WMF folks would want to reduce server load if nothing else.

I can think of a few horrible hacks to get around this, but I'm wondering if there is actually a good reason why caching is prohibited. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:01, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

@Suffusion of Yellow: depending on how you are watching, you may be getting extra 304 responses because you are watching: "Many developer tools' network panels of browsers create extraneous requests leading to 304 responses, so that access to the local cache is visible to developers." (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/304) — xaosflux ^Talk 23:06, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Works fine on 127.0.0.1, where I'm accessing MediaWiki directly, with no Varnish. And adding &maxage=86400 to API requests also works on enwiki. It's just index.php where I get the 304s. My understanding is that with s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate, the browser should be checking every time, developer tools or not. Can anyone else reproduce this? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:17, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Gadgets are loaded via the load.php endpoint, which has special caching rules applied to it. Stuff you're manually loading via importScript() hits the index.php?action=raw endpoint, which bypasses all varnish caching since you're logged-in. This isn't ideal, which is why Krinkle said "We should fix this...". Legoktm (talk) 07:33, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@Legoktm: Now I'm even more confused. Perhaps I linked to the wrong phab ticket. I'm not asking why varnish doesn't cache this; I'm asking why my browser is being told it must-revalidate every user script after 0 seconds. If I could bypass varnish somehow, that would be good thing, because it's varnish that's doing this deliberately:

	if (req.url ~ "^/wiki/" || req.url ~ "^/w/index\.php" || req.url ~ "^/\?title=") {
			// ...but exempt CentralNotice banner special pages
			if (req.url !~ "^/(wiki/|(w/index\.php)?\?title=)Special:Banner") {
				set resp.http.Cache-Control = "private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate";
			}
		}

I can get around this, by loading a script with a hack like mw.loader.load("https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Banner&title=User:Enterprisey/script-installer.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"), which gives me a sensible max-age=1209600, but I'm wondering if I should, or will this break something for me in some subtle way? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 18:15, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

How do you expect MediaWiki to invalidate the cache then, when the page is updated? Legoktm (talk) 02:24, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

@Legoktm: I'm expecting that a script being slightly out of date is not going to be a big deal. I can always shift-reload to get the latest version, if I want. Gadgets are coming back with public, max-age=2592000, s-maxage=2592000, which is twice as long and doesn't seem to cause any problems. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 02:36, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

The expected behavior is that user scripts update immediately. Gadgets go through ResourceLoader, which embeds versions in the URLs, so they can be cached. And ResourceLoader provides the versions in what's called the "startup" module which has a cache TTL of 5 minutes IIRC. Legoktm (talk) 04:13, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Is it possible to have a floating 'sidebar' that follows you up?

If you browse WP:CRAPWATCH/SETUP, it's a really really long list of stuff. If I'm halfway in the J2 section, and want to jump ahead to the W3 section, then it takes a pretty long time to scroll back up, find the TOC, and then click on W3. So I was thinking of having a small "Back to top" floating thingy that follows you as your scroll the page. Is this doable? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:16, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: have you tried just pressing your Home key, it should scroll you right back to the top of any page. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:55, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

You could also use a javascript such as Numbermaniac's User:Numbermaniac/goToTop.js. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:57, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Back to top. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:58, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@Xaosflux:

Facepalm, I don't know why I didn't think of that. Thanks, that's workable. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:01, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Have a look at {{Skip to top and bottom}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:51, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Wow, those are beautiful (if big!). Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:57, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

I reduced their size a bit. Still plenty big to be easily clickable, but won't take so much of the screen. And the great thing is that they can be used on every page in WP:JCW, like WP:JCW/C3. And by everyone, not just those of us with secret javascript skills.Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 09:03, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Headbomb: And if 'everyone' doesn't want it, how do we (I) remove it? I find those floating things distracting and annoying. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 13:42, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

BlackcurrantTea, Add the following lines to your common.css:

#skip-to-top-button,
#skip-to-bottom-button {display:none}

to hide both buttons. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:31, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

That's it. Thanks! BlackcurrantTea (talk) 15:42, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

F-Secure blocks Wikidata

Since yesterday, F-Secure blocks Wikidata. At least for me. J 1982 (talk) 13:07, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

If it is just a false positive, the powers that be at Wikidata (or others who are confident there is no malware) can take action here, if they want. 24.151.50.175 (talk) 16:01, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Two days ago, everything was fine. Yesterday, I could at least enter Wikidata from Google without any problems and only editing via "edit linka" under "languages". Today, I can't enter at all. J 1982 (talk) 16:51, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I just went to

https://www.f-secure.com/en/web/labs_global/submit-a-sample#sample-url

and submitted

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page (I also tried https://www.wikidata.org/)

The result I got was

Dear Customer, Thank you for submitting a sample to us. Your report has been sent to our Response team to be analysed. If you have chosen to be notified of the analysis result, the result will be sent to your email in a short while. F-Secure Labs

I have zero problems entering Wikidata from Google search. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:32, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I just tried Virustotal, and all 59 antivirus engines say that Wikidata is clean.

See https://www.virustotal.com/#/url/b52bfa6ef870cd9754d8409df6ea1b49b2b45ef9d45432d8a7d90d9d7e34abce/detection

--Guy Macon (talk) 18:36, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

@J 1982: F-Secure appears to have updated their database. If it is working for you now, this can probably be closed. 24.151.50.175 (talk) 15:46, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

I have already approved F-Secure to approve Wikidata. J 1982 (talk) 15:49, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

If you can go into the F-Secure interface and deactivate the whitelisting of wikidata.org, it would be a nice confirmation that it is now working for all F-Secure users without needing to whitelist the site but I understand if you just want to leave it working as is. 24.151.50.175 (talk) 16:04, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Tool that tracks WikiProject banner removals?

One of the functionalities previously provided by the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index assessment logs was tracking the removal of articles from a WikiProject (when a banner is removed or when an article is deleted). User:WP 1.0 bot hasn't been working for some four months now, and I'd like to know if there are alternative tools that could provide said information. It's relatively trivial to track project banner additions or other changes to talk pages via Special:RecentChangesLinked, but this of course doesn't work for removals. --Paul_012 (talk) 17:48, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

You could watchlist the category for the project "Category:WikiProject <project name> articles" and check the "page categorisation" option when displaying the watchlist. It does not pickup all changes for some reason but will help. Keith D (talk) 13:05, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

FWIW, I miss that feature too. The watchlist list does not have the options that the old list had. The list also showed changes to accessments and direct link to the change. An example, see Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Chemicals_articles_by_quality_log. Christian75 (talk) 13:33, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Have to agree that it is not ideal. There is a plan to replace the existing BOT with a new version, which is in development. See User:WP 1.0 bot/Third generation. Keith D (talk) 18:57, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Is anyone else seeing this or is it just me (wikisource opens wrong page)?

I went to https://wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

I opened the pages listed under "100 +" and "< 100" in tabs.

Four of them opened a *.wikipedia.org page instead of a *.wikisource.org page

The icon on the tab and the URL say "wikipedia" but the actual pages have the blue iceberg that says "wikisource".

Is this only happening to me or do others see the same thing?

If so, did they do this on purpose? --Guy Macon (talk) 17:39, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: oldwikisource:Template:Wikisource languages hasn't been updated in a while, but you should be able to go ahead and edit it or bring it up at oldwikisource:Template talk:Wikisource languages. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:44, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Ah, but what to replace the wikipedia URLS with? I went to the tab with the URL [ https://bar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text:Start ] and changed it to [ https://bar.wikisource.org/ ]. It redirected me to [ https://wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page ]. ( [ https://pms.wikisource.org/ ] redirected me to [ https://pms.wikisource.org/wiki/Intrada ]. ) --Guy Macon (talk) 18:19, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. All the links I tested appeared to be working as intended. Many small Wikisource languages don't have their own wiki with its own logs and a subdomain like https://en.wikisource.org. Some languages are instead hosted in a "Text" namespace at the Wikipedia in that language, e.g. https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text:Houptsyte for Allemanic (Houptsyte means Main page). Many languages have their pages at https://wikisource.org without a subdomain. The pages belonging to a language are in a category like https://wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Afrikaans for Afrikaans. All "real" Wikimedia wikis are listed as blue links at Special:SiteMatrix. There are only 68 for Wikisource while wikisource:Main Page shows far more languages. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:00, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-08

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

When you thank someone on the mobile web you will now have two seconds to cancel the thank. This is in case you clicked on the thank button by accident. [21]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 February. It will be on all wikis from 21 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

There is a proposal to add a red link to mobile search results if there is no page with that name. This is how it works on desktop. You can leave feedback. [22]

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

23:13, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Speedy painless tool to review complex citation templates

When reviewing existing reference citations, sometimes in the default edit window we see that the prior editor formatted the citation template in a column, with a line break after each parameter. Other editors prefer to collapse these by removing the line-breaks. Its all fun and good faith. In this example, the prior version shows columnar formatting, and the revision shows the same code with the line breaks removed. Every once in awhile, I'd like to do a wiki-gnomish review of the citation parameters, but its painfully slow when the linebreaks are absent.

Do we have a tool that could read a "collapsed" citation and display the parameters in columnar format in a pop up window? Would you use such a tool if it existed? If it doesn't exist, would this be something to suggest for Twinkle or somewhere else?

Thanks for thoughts NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:44, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't know about a tool, but here's how I do it: open two tabs for the article. In one tab, scroll down to the references. In the other tab, edit the article. Look through the references on the rendered page, and when you find an error, switch over to the "edit" tab to make changes. To check overall consistency, I like using {{ref info}} as well. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:25, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Jonesey95, that's more or less what I do now. It's Ok when there is one or two but try doing a reference review on an article like Global warming! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:37, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

WP:ProveIt may be of some help. << FR ^(mobileUndo) 11:33, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you very much, FR30799386! That is perfect. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:43, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

{{ref info|Global warming}} (put it in your sandbox or on the article's talk page) is helpful as well. It can be a little difficult to interpret at times, but some of the discrepancies it points out are easy to find and fix. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:52, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

List of URLs in an infobox

I have a list of URLs in an infobox, but the first and last links are outside the <p>...</p> element, like so:

But if I have the same code outside the infobox the issue is fixed, like so:

CVE-2019-0001
CVE-2019-0002
CVE-2019-0003
CVE-2019-0004
CVE-2019-0005

I'm using:

{{#invoke:String|replace|source=
CVE-2019-0001
CVE-2019-0002
CVE-2019-0003
CVE-2019-0004
CVE-2019-0005
|pattern=%a+%-%d+%-%d+|replace=[https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=%1 %1]<br />|plain=false}}

In the infobox I don't see why the first and last links are outside the <p>...</p> element. It's an issue because there's a visible break between the links. – BrandonXLF (t@lk) 23:32, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

{{left|{{infobox
|data1 = {{plainlist|{{#invoke:String|replace|source=
CVE-2019-0001
CVE-2019-0002
CVE-2019-0003
CVE-2019-0004
CVE-2019-0005
|pattern=%a+%-%d+%-%d+|replace=*[https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=%1 %1]|plain=false}}}}
}}}}

—Trappist the monk (talk) 01:04, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

My username appears in login box when it shouldn't

Whenever I am in incognito mode and I go to the login page, even when I am logged out, my username appears in the login page box. This occurs even when I have logged out, closed all incognito mode pages, and then opened Wikipedia in incognito mode again - my username still appears in the login page, even though I thought closing incognito mode deletes all history, cookies, and settings from incognito mode browsing. (Fortunately, my password does not appear.) Also, when I am not in incognito mode and go to the login page here, my username does not appear either. I am not sure why this is happening. My browser is Chrome 71 and my operating system is Windows 10. Diamond Blizzard talk 18:17, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

@Diamond Blizzard: this sounds like a feature of your browser - Autofill Forms. In chrome I think you can avoid this by using "Guest mode" instead. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:43, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

See also https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/6130773 — xaosflux ^Talk 18:44, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

In my experience, leaving one incognito browser tab open will keep the cookies from getting cleared.
On an old Chromebook running Chrome version 65, closed incognito browser, (Google wipes history for all my signed-in devices when I "clear browsing data". I specialized clearing the browser data to this single device by making sure no other device was signed in.). Opened incognito browser, started Wikipedia, it had empty login field. So an empty login field works for me. On the older chromebook, ("Autofill settings is On". I think this is the default. )
Then I tried on a newer Chromebook running Chrome version 70, closed incognito browser, Opened incognito browser, started Wikipedia, it had empty login field. The non-incognito browser was still up; when I started up another Wikipedia session, it remembered me. Opened incognito browser, started Wikipedia, it had empty login field, BUT the browser history for that empty login field had a token in a drop-down list. I hadn't cleared the browser history.
Cleared browser history on the older Chromebook, no other devices signed in. When I set Chrome's "Autofill settings is Off" then the empty login field has no data in the dropdown menu.
I don't use Windows, so I can't run that part of the test.

--Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 22:27, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

@Xaosflux and Ancheta Wis: Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for your suggestion. It is just that I don't think it would be Autofill. Erasing all Autofill data on my computer doesn't remove the username from the login box, my computer says it has no Autofill data to erase in the first place when I go to the "Clear browsing data," there is no Autofill option or highlighting like there normally is for Autofill, the username isn't immediately present when I am not in Incognito mode, and closing all Incognito mode tabs should erase any such data permanently, but it doesn't. I was thinking it has to be some kind of data Wikipedia itself is storing.

Also, this is actually my own computer, but I do let others borrow it occasionally. And I have repeatedly checked and made sure yes, I am closing all incognito mode tabs on this device. I don't think I have logged into Wikipedia in non-incognito mode at any time or device I can remember. I will try turning Autofill off anyway, if I can find the setting. I will log out here and close all Incognito tabs and then open a new Incognito tab and see the login page again.Diamond Blizzard talk 22:42, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I tried, but I couldn't find a specific "Autofill" setting to turn off. My browser already does not save financial information or addresses, nor autocomplete URLs or searches, and even turning off syncing for autofill does not make my username go away. Also, I just checked that on my smartphone (which I am signed into with my Google (not Wikipedia) account, like I have a Google account I am signed into on this computer) and my username did not appear on the login screen, even though I have signed to Wikipedia there a few times in the past. Neither clearing all data or closing all tabs (including non-incognito ones) or turning off and then turning on my computer removes the username either. Diamond Blizzard talk 22:59, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Question: how change Edit box background color?

On Vector.css skin is there a way to make edit window a different background color instead of white?

For Vector.css I added line for textarea {background-color: LimeGreen; }. When edit box first opens, that color shows for about 2 seconds then reverts to white background.

I did search through VP archives before asking here. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 01:44, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: Do you have syntax highlighter on? – BrandonXLF (t@lk) 02:04, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: .ace_editor, textarea {background-color: LimeGreen; } should work, it also styles the ace editor (syntax highlighter). – BrandonXLF (t@lk) 02:27, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

@BrandonXLF: - Yes, it was On so I un-checked & now Edit box BG color is good. Thanks for your help. Cheers JoeHebda (talk) 02:33, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Could someone usurp KadaneBot?

Hi all, Kadane very helpfully created KadaneBot for us over at Wikipedia Peer Review - it sends out automated reminders based on topic areas of interest for unanswered peer reviews. Unfortunately, Kadane's been inactive almost since creation (September 2018), and hasn't responded to my request [23]. Would anyone be so kind as to usurp this bot so we can continue to use it? --Tom (LT) (talk) 10:37, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Have you asked at WP:BON or WP:BOTREQ? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:40, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Redrose64, wasn't aware of the noticeboard, will move discussion there. --Tom (LT) (talk) 09:00, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Moved to WP:BON

LOG-IN PROBLEMS

For the last couple of days I've been having a weird intermittent problem with staying logged-in. I keep having to log in again, it's okay for a short while -- and then, whoops, here we go again. Very annoying, to say the least -- but probably not enough to come here and ask about it. Except that NOW I cannot log in no matter what I do. It starts when I'm trying to make an edit to an article, and all-of-a-sudden -- I'm not logged in. So I try to log in, but I get a message on the page telling me that "there is no log-in session". So I try again, and it takes me to "Central user login". The first time that happened it let me log in. But now even that isn't working -- "no log-in session". I've never run into anything like this before. Are other people having this problem, or is it just me?? 76.9.73.150 (talk) 04:13, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Clear browser cache and cookies. Check computer clock is accurate. -- GreenC 04:17, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict)You happen to be editing as a IP address (Unregistered User). If you happen to have problems logging in, I would suggest clearing your browsing data and try again, or if you happen too be logged in, log out, and clear your browser cache, then try again. --Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 04:17, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Also suggesting what GreenC said, Check that your computer clock is correct. (Green C and I got edit Conflicted, so that's why their edit did not show up). --Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 04:20, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for your quick replies. <SIGH> This is so exasperating... I reloaded the page and saw your replies -- still logged out, that's why you saw my IP#. I was about to try resetting my clock, but thought I'd try logging in one more time, just so I'd know for sure that it really was the clock if it suddenly allowed me to log in. And whaddaya know -- even without resetting the clock, it let me log in. WTF??? And whaddaya bet it logs me out again when I post this comment? Anomalous+0 (talk) 04:31, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

@Anomalous+0: This sounds similar to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 170#Repeatedly logged out. As I noted there, you can normally stabilise your cookies by deliberately logging out and then logging in again. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:15, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Expanding use of the "Live updates" feature

Resolved

I'd like to see the "Live updates" tab, as used on Special:Watchlist and Special:RecentChanges, expanded to also be available for use on Special:Log/newusers. Is there a reason that makes this a bad idea (technical or otherwise)? If not, would it require an RfC or could it be requested straight away as a Phabricator feature request? Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 20:46, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

@John Cline: There might be some noise, but I think this comes close to what you want: [24] — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:34, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you MusikAnimal. That accomplishes everything I would have hoped without any hint of noise AFAICT. It even refreshes the respective "contribs" link, turning them blue when appropriate, upon each update. I am happy, the thread is resolved, and I thank you again. Best regards.--John Cline (talk) 23:13, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Two gadgets broken on mobile

Following up from some talk page topics I added, two gadgets from User:Enterprisey are throwing errors on the mobile interface. They make assumptions about the HTML that are not valid in the mobile skin.

I'm not sure if these were intended to be run on mobile, but to fix this we should either stop them running in this environment, or improve the code by adding some checks that HTML elements exist. Can anybody help with this? I do not have sufficient permissions to do so.

They are:

Thanks in advance!

Jdlrobson (talk) 22:32, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson: Though Enterprisey will likely be along sooner rather than later, we also have an WP:Interface administrators' noticeboard in case there are critical issues in the future. --Izno (talk) 22:43, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

These should never be critical as, (1) these aren't gadgets and (2) anyone can just stop using them whenever they want. If Enterprisey would like to fix his own personal userscripts, that is up to him. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:35, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

If the script author isn't responsive for whatever reason VPT/IANB are probably appropriate. Enterprisey (talk!) 23:38, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting these! The up-one-lvl-kbd error was fixed. I cannot reproduce any errors with reply-link; I've responded over there. Also, what Izno said regarding IANB. Enterprisey (talk!) 23:36, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Difference between revisions not working

I was looking at the difference between revisions shown here https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Glycine_encephalopathy&diff=next&oldid=875012913 for the page Glycine encephalopathy, between Citation Bot's edit on December 23rd and Citation Bot's edit on February 21st (the latest two edits) and instead of the expected highlighted differences, I saw what is shown in the following image:

. As you can see, the highlights are strange, and its not clear what was removed, or if anything was added. Refereshing did not make it look better. I am using Google Chrome, Version 72.0.3626.109 (Official Build) (64-bit) running on a Lenovo Windows 10 Pro machine. What's going on here and what was the edit the bot made? --HighFlyingFish (talk) 03:38, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

The diff is correct. It shows spaces being removed. The bot changed consecutive spaces to a single space. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:47, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Huh ok. The visual just seems really strange to me. --HighFlyingFish (talk) 05:41, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

23 spaces were removed the first time and 16 the second time. The first group of removed spaces with colored background are displayed as crossing the margin of the first column but I would call that a minor issue. It doesn't happen for me in Firefox when I adjust the window size to hit the margin but I get another minor issue where the colored background shrinks to fit within the margin instead of being displayed fully on the next line. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:19, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

I guess you can mark resolved, since I understand what happened now. --HighFlyingFish (talk) 02:30, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Talk pages consultation 2019

The Wikimedia Foundation has invited the various Wikimedia communities, including the English Wikipedia, to participate in a consultation on improving communication methods within the Wikimedia projects. As such, a request for comment has been created at Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019. All users are invited to express their views and to add new topics for discussion. (To keep discussion in one place, please don't reply to this comment.) Jc86035 (talk) 14:57, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Assigning categories based on existing page categories

Hello guys..

I just want to know if there is any variable or magic word that's help to assign a category based on existing page categories.

I mean like an if-conditional statement:- if this variable|value true then, add this category. where variable represent existing page categories. --Mohanad Kh (talk) 14:40, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Can you give an example? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 16:52, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

@AlanM1: like this : {{PAGECATEGORY}} for example. - Mohanad Kh (talk) 14:55, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

That doesn't help at all. Can you give examples of pages where your desired feature would be useful? What exactly would it do? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:40, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Video can't play on Chrome Android

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T217085

I tried to play the video on American cockroach on my Android phone with Google Chrome. But it doesn't play at all.

The video can be played if I manually open the commons:File:Periplaneta americana performing a high-speed inversion on a ramp (side view) - Journal.pone.0038003.s002.ogv media page and played from there (as an embedded video). But there is no link to this media page on the article page either (it only has a "play media" link, which leads to the ".ogv" URL directly that I can't play).

I understand this probably could be a Chrome issue. But considering its prevalence, could we improve the way we display video in article(s)?

--fireattack (talk) 04:04, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Wrapping signatures in markup

There is a discussion taking place on whether to wrap signatures in markup in progress at VPPR. Enterprisey (talk!) 07:35, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Evaluating a user's ID number

Is there a process whereby a User ID can be evaluated so as to return the corresponding Username? Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 09:07, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

On-wiki? Dunno offhand. Via the api, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususerids=11987994. Documentation here. —Cryptic 10:08, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

IPv6 problems with visual editor?

I've noticed that when using the new, non-forms based editor (in either the source or full WSIWYG variants, on my desktop brower), the "progress bar" at the start of the editing process will often get stuck about 75% of the way through, preventing the page from being edited, but that this behavior happens only when I have IPv6 connectivity enabled. Without IPv6 enabled, this is never a problem. With IPv6, it happens most of the time; page reloads will sometimes fix it, but it may take a lot of them to do so. I suspect this might be an IPv6 connectivity problem with some of the servers in the Wikipedia hosting cloud. -- The Anome (talk) 13:16, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Now also posted at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Feedback -- let's see if that gets a response. -- The Anome (talk) 14:29, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Is that the connection? I had this problem yesterday. --Izno (talk) 17:26, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Help with Template

Moved from Wikipedia:Tea House § Help with template

Dear friendly editors.

Can anyone help me edit this Template:Inconsistent Birthday? Basically, the purpose is to allow pass in multiple (ideally, indefinite number of) entries of InterWikiLinks and Birthdays as variables of the template, and use it on Talk page.

It looks like this right now

{{Inconsistent Birthday}} Xinbenlv (talk) 07:26, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Hi Xinbenlv. Because templates can affect lots of pages (sometimes in not so obvious ways) and the syntax involved can be a bit complicated, you might get better feedback from experienced template editors by asking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Templates or even Wikipedia:Village Pump/Technical instead. Moreover, you should be aware that templates which have little encyclopedic value or are redundant to exisiting template can end up being nominated for deletion at WP:TFD if they don't comply with Wikipedia:Template namespace for some reason. I'm not saying that's the case here, but just pointing it out in case you weren't aware of it. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:42, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you that's very helpful. I will ask over there. Xinbenlv (talk) 07:45, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Noting in passing that it appears an error was made on the Japanese Wikipedia version of this article, and the date of birth has been corrected there. It was a pretty obvious error, given that the Japanese article had him signed to football teams before he was putatively born. Risker (talk) 19:02, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- Actually on looking at this again, the Japanese version never had an incorrect date of birth, and I'm not sure why that example has been used. In any case, when finding that kind of thing, it is far, far better to verify the correct information and insert it into the version with the error, using appropriate references as required. Risker (talk) 19:06, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Template existence

Hello guys

Is there any way to check if a template exists in some page?

For ex: if ( {{x}} or templatename/label ) exist in pagename then true. -Mohanad Kh (talk) 19:22, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

You could open up the page source, run your browser's "find" function, and search for {{templatename. Of course, you'd have to do this for every redirect to that template as well. Eman 235/talk 21:43, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry, this's not the right answer for my question. Mohanad Kh (talk) 14:35, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Help:What links here – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 22:16, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry, that's not what I'm looking for. Mohanad Kh (talk) 14:35, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

What exactly are you trying to do? —AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:36, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Talk to us about talking

The Wikimedia Foundation is planning a global consultation about communication. The goal is to bring Wikimedians and wiki-minded people together to improve tools for communication.

We want all contributors to be able to talk to each other on the wikis, whatever their experience, their skills or their devices.

We are looking for input from as many different parts of the Wikimedia community as possible. It will come from multiple projects, in multiple languages, and with multiple perspectives.

We are currently planning the consultation. We need your help.

We need volunteers to help talk to their communities or user groups.

You can help by hosting a discussion at your wiki. Here's what to do:

First, sign up your group here.
Next, create a page (or a section on a Village pump, or an e-mail thread – whatever is natural for your group) to collect information from other people in your group. This is not a vote or decision-making discussion: we are just collecting feedback.
Then ask people what they think about communication processes. We want to hear stories and other information about how people communicate with each other on and off wiki. Please consider asking these five questions:
1. When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you?
2. What about talk pages works for newcomers, and what blocks them?
3. What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
4. What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?
5. What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?
Finally, please go to Talk pages consultation 2019 on Mediawiki.org and report what you learned from your group. Please include links if the discussion is available to the public.

You can also help build the list of the many different ways people talk to each other.

Not all groups active on wikis or around wikis use the same way to discuss things: it can happen on wiki, on social networks, through external tools... Tell us how your group communicates.

You can read more about the overall process on mediawiki.org. If you have questions or ideas, you can leave feedback about the consultation process in the language you prefer.

Thank you! We're looking forward to talking with you.

Trizek (WMF) 15:08, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

@Trizek (WMF): Is the primary contact allowed to change, and would it be acceptable to have either zero or multiple primary contacts? I would have signed up both Wikidata and the English Wikipedia, but I'm concerned that the community size here might be too large, or that there might be too much discussion for a single user to summarize (several past discussions have been closed by groups of three uninvolved administrators), or that I might not be active when the feedback is supposed to be sent. Jc86035 (talk) 11:37, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

@Winged Blades of Godric: (I'm notifying you since you posted the discussion here.) Would this page be an appropriate venue, or should a new page be created to discuss the consultation? Jc86035 (talk) 11:37, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your questions, Jc86035

Yes, you can have multiple primary contacts if that's easier for your community. Zero contact makes things a bit more complicated: we need to have some names to contact for the next steps. In any case, find people to help you is a good idea, especially of you plan to start the consultation on two wikis.

You can also make sub-discussions on the same community. If a wikiproject thinks that they have a particular use of the discussions (because of what they do, or how they work, or with who they work), they can create a separated consultation. The consultation is a flexible process: as far as your community manages to collect and gather the feedback (phase 1 is individual feedback), how you organize yourself is up to you.

In any case, a dedicated page would be certainly easier to edit and monitor. If you want some inspiration, French Wikipedia has created such a page, with buttons to ease comments.

Thanks again, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:37, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

@Trizek and Trizek (WMF): Thanks for clarifying. I've drafted a page at Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019. Is it fine if the users who are to be contacted are listed in a dynamic list on that page? Jc86035 (talk) 09:43, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

@Trizek and Trizek (WMF): I've formally activated the RFC and will be advertising it shortly. I've provisionally listed myself as the primary contact. Jc86035 (talk) 14:30, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Jc86035, please only ping Trizek (WMF). My account without parenthesis is my volunteer account. I'm using it over the the weekend on some cosmetics aspects of the French Wikipedia side consultation.

Trizek ^{from fr:} 15:00, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

@Jc86035: Whatever works for you concerning listing users to contact or making a global announcement. We expect to have a central notice banner soon. Thank you for organizing that consultation on two wikis, it is a huge amont of work! I hope you will have people to help you as the primary contact! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 09:43, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

New editing software is impossible to use

I have just attempted to add a single piped link to an article. By deleting a s

Si letter, an entire word disappeared and in trying to fix that, I created four or five blank lines, and in attempting to fix that, a perfectly good link was deleted. I cannot work out how, following ten years as a Wikipedia editor, I'm now stuck with a new process which is impossible to use. I used to be happy doing little minor changes and fixing things. That's almost completely removed from me,

like a punishmen Please can I have the old edit function returned? doktorb _words^deeds 10:50, 25 February 2019 (UTC)t. I've just tired to finish this paragraph and by pressing "enter" it's gone to the top, not the bottom! ngle

Disable "New wikitext mode" and "Automatically enable all new beta features" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:56, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try that doktorb _words^deeds 16:12, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-09

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

There is a new version of the iOS Wikipedia app. It has for example syntax highlighting and new toolbars to make it easier to write wikitext. It also has night mode, a find-on-page function and other things. You can give feedback and suggestions. [25]

Changes later this week

When you look at your watchlist or the recent changes page you can use the new filters for edit review. There you can choose tags to filter different edits. Empty tags will no longer be shown. [26]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 February. It will be on all wikis from 28 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The Wikipedia app for Android will invite users to add Wikidata descriptions to Wikidata objects that have Wikipedia articles but no Wikidata descriptions. It will only invite users who have added a number of Wikidata descriptions in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. You can read more and leave feedback.

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

21:16, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Syntax highlighting

What changed, in the last couple of days, that is causing some horrible kind of syntax highlighting? It even disables my Firefox spell checker. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:03, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: Nothing has changed for me... --DannyS712 (talk) 22:11, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: This happened to me and I was just as perplexed but then I clicked the little pencil-looking icon to the left of "Advanced" in the editor and it turned off.

Note to the WMF design team, who should know better: The toggle state design for the editor toolbar is insufficient and should be improved. You have to have better than 20:20 vision for it to be immediately obvious.--Jorm (talk) 22:33, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

That's it; thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:52, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

If you have a problem with something you can name then try entering it after WP: in the search box in order to search the project namespace. WP:Syntax highlighting is the name of an existing page so you would go directly there and quickly find the answer. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:21, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree that toggle state really should be more obvious. Have filed phab:T217215. the wub "?!" 00:30, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Shortcut keys for the Desktop view; Alt+Shift+T+ doesn't work on Chrome

The mobile view of Wikipedia is useful, but it doesn't support keyboard shortcuts for users with visual impairment, blindness or disabilities. For this catfegory of users, it would be helpful to provide to have any WP page with:

1) a shortcut linked to "mobile view" dislayed at the end of the page, in order to easily switch between mobile and desktop view.

2) with the same shortcuts now available in the " Visual Editing" mode, being available in the "Source Editing" mode too:
- Alt+Shift+S ("Publish changes"),
- Alt+Shift+V ("Show chnges"),
- ALt+Shift+P (Preview).

3) to have an additional list of key shortcutsor the options displayed at the top:
- "Bold", "Italic",
- "Advanced", "Special characters",
- "Help" and "Cite".

It can be the same both for "Visual Editing" or "Source Editing", and can adopt the standard used by OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word 2007.

4) On Google Chrome and with the WP Desktop view, the keyboard combination Alt+Shift+T doesn't work, so that users can't open the talk page related to any WP article. This issue happens with all other WP Project, but not with other browsers such the latest version of Mozilla Firefox or Opera. All other keyboard shortcuts seem to work: Alt+Shift+E (Edit), Alt+Shift+H (History), ALt+Shift+P (Preview), Alt+Shift+S (Publish), Alt+Shift+V (show differences between revisions).

It may seem a long list, whereas it is only a detailed one. In my opinion, the environment is almost perfect for people with disabilities. hope it helps. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.223.69.161 (talk) 20:48, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

1) How often do you need to switch? There aren't a lot of unassigned shortcuts left.

2) This sounds like phab:T210569. The keyboard shortcuts ought to be working in the 2010 wikitext editor. Can someone with Chrome/Windows check whether the Wikipedia:Keyboard shortcuts are broken there?

3) If you want more keyboard shortcuts while editing, then you might want to login and enable the "New wikitext mode" in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:37, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Sporadic login failures

I'm getting sporadic login failures from the FACBot. They seem to have started around the beginning of January; it didn't happen in 2018. I'm getting one or two per day, which is annoying an disruptive. The scripts run okay when I repeat the request manually. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what the problem could be or how to troubleshoot it? I don't get any errors back from a failed login. Otherwise, the best I can do is to order the Bot to retry the login. (My fear is that OAuth may be required in future, which would be very, very bad.) Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:35, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

@Hawkeye7: what login type are you using for that bot now (e.g. Web Password, BotPasswords, OAuth). — xaosflux ^Talk 05:04, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Web password. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:17, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

@Hawkeye7: I had this happen a few times recently. My bots will retry logins up to 3 times, so the failures might have happened more often, I just didn't notice because it was able to get in within the three tries. So, I do recommend that tactic if this continues. I wouldn't worry about OAuth being required in the foreseeable future, but you should be using Special:BotPasswords at least.

Just to make sure, you aren't by chance talking about the "login from device you have not recently used" emails? I ask because I suddenly started getting those a few days ago with MusikBot, and my other bot started getting them a few months ago. That issue is tracked at phab:T182867. — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:52, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

I will see if BotPasswords works. Thanks for your help. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:32, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Hmmm must have made a mistake generating the BotPasswords. "assertbotfailed: Assertion that the user has the "bot" right failed. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:01, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Editing toolbar

Please can the editing toolbar problems be sorted? Where has Wikitext gone, things like "hide text" and "no include"? They used to be at the bottom and easily accessible. Now I can't find them at all. Thanks. doktorb _words^deeds 14:12, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Doktorbuk: Does this help? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:57, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Not really. I want to know how to use the functionality I could use a few days ago. That link is to a discussion, not a guide. doktorb _words^deeds 19:53, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Doktorbuk: Which editor did your editor look like last week, and which editor does it look like now? Did you have any related gadgets or user scripts enabled? Jc86035 (talk) 10:07, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

(Sorry, I didn't realize this might already be resolved in § New editing software is impossible to use.) Jc86035 (talk) 10:12, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

This is about Help:Edittools/CharInsert, which the 2017WTE doesn't support. (But, hey, there's a brand-new product manager for Editing, so when they're done with the mobile stuff, maybe he and I can have that conversation afresh. ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Fetch article creators from a list of articles

Resolved

I've got a list of about 300 articles. For each article, I would like to be able to see the user who created it as well as the user rights they have (I'm only interested in sysop and autoreviewer). Is there an easy way to pull out that information? – Uanfala (talk) 19:09, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Uanfala: using the api, it should be doable --DannyS712 (talk) 19:10, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Uanfala: If you look at Draft:Bbno$, which has been created twice, you can get the most recent page creator with https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=logevents&letitle=Draft:Bbno$&letype=create&lelimit=1. Then, you can extract the username of the creator and retrieve their user groups https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=SebiTalent04&usprop=groups. But, this returns their current groups, not their groups at the time, if it matters. --DannyS712 (talk) 19:32, 24 February 2019 (UTC) --DannyS712 (talk) 19:34, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Good, thanks. But I've never used the API before, so do I need to download such a json file for each article and then extract the relevant information using some other tool? – Uanfala (talk) 20:48, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Uanfala: no; let me work up a script to run on a page and return the info of its creator and their user groups, and then try to extend that to work on all the pages. I don't have much time in the next few days - how soon do you need it? --DannyS712 (talk) 20:57, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

That sounds like it's getting too complicated. I can mass-download the json files, no problem with that, and I can probably try whipping up some script to extract the info myself (though I'm not sure how simple this will be with my rather limited technical capabilites). I was hoping there could be some really simple way to do that, like some SQL query or whatever that could return the necessary information in one fell swoop. – Uanfala (talk) 21:10, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Querying the creation log like that isn't reliable, since it was added so recently; the oldest logged page is Draft talk:Morrison Machiavelli (log), from 2018-06-27 23:10:06. —Cryptic 21:22, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw the caveat: that's alright. Almost all of the pages in the list are new anyway, and I'm mostly interested in the broad pattern, so I'm not after 100% accuracy. – Uanfala (talk) 21:26, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

quarry:query/33696. —Cryptic 21:10, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, Cryptic, that's precisely what I needed! Who would have thought that mentioning the word "SQL" could seemingly conjure a complex query out of thin air in less than a minute. – Uanfala (talk) 21:26, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Cryptic: Thanks - I guess scripts aren't the solution to everything after all --DannyS712 (talk) 02:48, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Talk:Bass Guitar - no section edit ability

Hello, I just noticed that on Talk:Bass guitar, there appears to be no edit function provided to the right of the topic headings, when compared with other Talk pages. I am not sure where to report this. William Harris • (talk) • 00:54, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

I have reverted some confused archiving attempts which added __NOEDITSECTION__ to the main talk page instead of an archive. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:45, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Many thanks PrimeHunter, that solved the problem. William Harris • (talk) • 04:41, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Proposal to make TfD more RM-like, as a clearinghouse of template discussions

FYI

– Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Templates for discussion#RfC: Proposal to make TfD more RM-like, as a clearinghouse of template discussions. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:16, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Main page and portals don't play nice with Android app

Portal:United States in the Android app

Since the headings in the different sections of the Main Page and most portals aren't real headings, they don't show up in the table of contents pane when these pages are viewed in the Android app. This makes these pages difficult to navigate on mobile. How can we address this? Qzekrom (talk) 06:30, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Getting the page name and date parts in LUA

I'm currently working on trying to replace {{cfd all}} with a LUA module. However, I can't figure out how to get the equivilents of {{FULLPAGENAME}}, {{CURRENTDAY}}, {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} and {{CURRENTYEAR}}. Can someone please tell me how to do these? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:25, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@Od Mishehu: See mediawikiwiki:Extension:Scribunto/Lua reference manual, particularly mw.title.getCurrentTitle and os.date. --Izno (talk) 14:29, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@Od Mishehu: Is there some reason that Template:Cfd all needs to be implemented in Lua? I would TfD Module:Sandbox/Od Mishehu/cfd as it currently is coded as "Unnecesary Lua module, can be implemented in Wikitext" if it weren't in userspace. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 20:37, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Unknown parameter warning doesn't include all unknown parameters

Hi friends, I was editing Sherlyn Chopra and did a preview. I love that we have a tool that points out the various parameters that not supported by the infobox. In the case of {{Infobox pageant titleholder}}, |weight=, |website=,|ethnicity=, and |measurements= are indicated as invalid parameters. But I'm curious why there was no prompt to remove some of the other erroneous parameters like |dress_size=, |collar=, |suit= and |shoe_size=. I love this tool, but shouldn't it highlight all of the non-standard parameters so editors can catch them all in one session? (Just to keep this issue raw, I didn't fix the erroneous parameters I found.) Thanks! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 04:49, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

The unknown parameter check in that template, like most such checks, has ignoreblank = y set. This means that blank parameters are not flagged as errors. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:43, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Data for Archive 172, item 54: screenshot

@User:TheDJ, I was able to capture a screenshot of the situation described in Archive 172, item 54: Blue links are overwriting article text. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 03:14, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Link: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 172#Layout of blue links and the footnote numbers is messed up during preview of an article in edit mode --DannyS712 (talk) 03:17, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Ancheta Wis, judging from the screenshot and the results with various versions of the browser, it seems like this is a font size measuring bug during load time with Chrome... I don't think we can do much about :( —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:28, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your thought on this phenomenon. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 08:31, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Import confirm-logout gadget from Chinese Wikipedia

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T217914

Chinese Wikipedia have this nice gadget where clicking on the logout link on the top right will result in a warning prompt banner, instead of taking you instantly to Special:UserLogout. I find this tool especially helpful as I prefer to use desktop mode on mobile browsers and my thumb usually slips to "Log out" when I try to reach the "Contributions" link. Per documentation, the gadget supports English language out-of-the-box. Is there a way to import this to English Wikipedia so that it appears in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets for everyone to use? Or as a optional userscript？Pinging gadget creator. @Bluedeck:. Thanks. Tsumikiria⧸ 🌹🌉 20:50, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

I believe you can install it yourself as a userscript by adding the following line to your common.js:

mw.loader.load("//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=user:bluedeck/source/confirm-logout.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript");

HTH, Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 21:38, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@Writ Keeper: Well, if anything, it didn't work. Maybe I'm missing some CSS? Tsumikiria⧸ 🌹🌉 23:24, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

We do have User:Fred Gandt/confirmLogout.js on enwiki as well (not as a gadget though). --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:20, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

This one worked, thank you. Although it would be nice if this is more accessible. Tsumikiria⧸ 🌹🌉 23:24, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Hey, Tsumikiria, glad you liked the gadget. I've added support for enwiki. It works here now. Bluedeck 20:13, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Archive bot not archiving

The bot for archiving on talk page Talk:Civil rights movement is set-up to archive discussions after 180 days. Yet, there are discussions from February 2018 onward that remain unarchived. A page move occurred in March 2018 and may have something to do with it. Don't know how to fix this. Mitchumch (talk) 18:37, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mitchumch: I've added minthreadsleft = 3 to the archiving instructions so that the oldest threads can be archived. The default for minthreadsleft is 5, telling the bot to leave at least 5 threads on the page - in this case, all of them. -- John of Reading (talk) 18:44, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. In the past, page moves resulted in crazy performance issues. Glad it was a simple explanation this time. Mitchumch (talk) 19:38, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mitchumch: After a page move, the |archive= parameter of the {{User:MiszaBot/config}} template does need to be updated to point to the new location, like this. Unless that is done, archiving bots will refuse to process the page; I notice that between that edit and your first post here, Lowercase sigmabot III (talk · contribs) had archived the page twice. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:42, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Idea: Change symbol/icon templates to use text instead of images

I'd like to propose that many templates used for displaying special characters (e.g. {{Dagger}}, {{Double-dagger}}, {{X mark}}, etc) be modified to use actual text instead of an image. Currently, these files embed a PNG of the symbol and include an alt attribute describing the symbol. This makes the symbols more accessible for those who use screen readers, but it presents other issues. Anyone who views Wikipedia with a "dark theme" that inverts the color scheme will struggle to see this symbols, as the symbol will not change to white like the rest of the text. I use one of these extensions called Dark Reader and these symbols are next to invisible to me. These extensions have tons of users (Dark Reader alone has over a million between Chrome and Firefox), and there is also Wikipedia's own "Use a black background with green text" option in Special:Preferences that has the same problem. Using images of the symbols also prevent the symbol from being seen in search result summaries, being found with Ctrl+F, etc.

If we render these symbols as text instead of as an image, we can eliminate all of these issues while still maintaining accessibility. Although text cannot have an alt attribute, there are other ways to indicate its meaning for screen readers. The best option would probably be to put the symbols in a <span> tag and include an aria-label attribute with the alt text. Another option would be to show the alt text in an invisible, screen reader-only element. Either of these options would be very accessible to screen readers while also being more friendly with the other scenarios I've described. –IagoQnsi (talk) 18:06, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

These could reasonably be called abbreviations also, so use <abbr>. --Izno (talk) 18:54, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Abbr is only read out by screen readers on demand (the screen reader user has to know the abbr tag exists). I'd have to test the ARIA label trick but the CSS-hiding trick might result in the screen reader saying the symbol twice (if it does indeed read out, say, the dagger symbol natively), and I've heard about problems with Chrome related to it. Graham87 03:11, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

@Graham87: How the heck do you know a priori whether an abbr element exists? --Izno (talk) 00:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

@Izno: We don't; that's the problem. Automatic expansion of these tags can be arranged but it's not the default setting. Graham87 08:02, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

That's dumb. :D --Izno (talk) 15:44, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Incorporating a hieroglyph in English text

In the article Unicode, I am using the Commons file "Hiero O4.png" to display the hieroglyph . It would be more consistent with the subject matter to use 𓉔 but that produces the tiny glyph 𓉔. {{huge|𓉔}} yields 𓉔, which is a reasonable size but prints below the line and forces the following line down. Is there a way of raising it and retaining normal line spacing?

I am using Firefox 65.0.2.

Thanks,

— Peter Brown (talk) 01:14, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Sorry I have no answer to the actual questions you're asking, but I assume I'm not seeing the same thing you do. There's no way to have complete control over what someone else's browser renders. I think your "tiny glyph" looks perfect, except it's a funny gray color. It fits right in with the line of English text. The other two seem too big. Ntsimp (talk) 21:23, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

FWIW, on my current browser (FireFox on windows) the 13254 attempts don't display at all, just the sad failed unicode boxes. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:38, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

The WikiHiero extension is loaded on all Wikimedia wikis. Have you tried that? --Izno (talk) 00:37, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Here, in a PNG file, is what I’m seeing. Apparently it’s so browser-dependent that I’m very unlikely to get what I’m after; the Commons file is the best I can do.

I am totally unfamiliar with MediaWiki. This is the first I've heard of it, though I've been contributing to Wikipedia since 2012.

The wikitext <hiero>O4</hiero> gives me

entirely on a line by itself , though I haven't specified that. I wanted something on the same line, which the Commons file gives me, though the resolution is not so good.

xaosflux ^Talk, perhaps you should upgrade your Windows and/or your Firefox.

Izno, check out MOS:DASH:"Do not use a double hyphen (--) to stand in for a dash". Tut, tut.

Thanks anyhow, all three of of you.

— Peter Brown (talk) 02:45, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

We have wide latitude on talk pages to ignore the WP:MOS in most ways (WP:LISTGAP is not one of them). That aside, the "--" has been in-use on Wikipedia to sign things since before I started in 2007 and was once the default way to sign something via the 2006 wikitext editor (and perhaps even still in the 2010 wikitext editor). So, kindly, don't tut at me, especially after I've tried to provide some aid for your problem. There's a saying for that.... --Izno (talk) 03:01, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, if you use the signature button in the editing toolbar above the edit window, you get two hyphens and four tildes. Like this: --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:37, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

phab:T210695 has a discussion that may be useful about putting hiero inline. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:12, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Izno, my deepest apologies. The tuts were intended as jest. I'm sorry that they were not understood as such. Many of my friends, as well as my spouse, use double hyphens regularly.

It's news to me that WP:MOS is not applicable to talk pages. Is this documented somewhere? Does this mean that, on talk pages, we can use “curly” quotation marks in defiance of MOS:STRAIGHT?

I am sorry that I did not make clear my hesitation with using the “Hiero O4.png” file. Since I was editing the Unicode article, I thought it appropriate, if possible, to base the display of the hieroglyph on the code point U+13254 rather than on the O4 code in Gardiner's sign list. As the <hiero> techniques also use that list, they’re no improvement. It appears, however, that a satisfactory Unicode-based display is not available, so I’ll stick with the Commons file.

Again, thanks to all.

— Peter Brown (talk) 20:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Help

How to install twinkle gadget. I am a smartphone user. Regards Balolay (talk) 09:31, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

You will probably want to log in to the desktop interface, which should be accessible from the mobile site if not the app. From there, go to Gadgets under Special:Preferences. I do not know if the gadgets page can be accessed otherwise. --Izno (talk) 13:26, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-10

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

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

You can give feedback on the future of talk pages.
The mobile website will use the standard fonts on your computer or phone instead of a generic font. This will make it easier to read text in many scripts. [27][28]

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

16:38, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Incorrect report of the oldest revisions of France

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T38976

The 3 oldest revision of France seems buggy:

The bytes diff is incorrect in the 3 oldest revisions (see screenshot)
- Also reproduced on the user contributions page
The oldest revision doesn't look like the ~earliest~oldest one

--Dam-io (talk) 12:25, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

This is an artifact of how MediaWiki revisions are stored and how revisions were stored under the software used to run Wikipedia prior to MediaWiki, which were probably imported from that database after we enabled the character difference count. It's not a big deal and can't be fixed. --Izno (talk) 13:24, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, these revisions were imported in 2009. See 38976 for the gorey details of why this occurs. Graham87 01:42, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, also curious about why the oldest revision doesn't look like the first revision, maybe an early import from Nupedia ? --Dam-io (talk) 13:50, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Many 2001 revisions are lost. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:32, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

What happened to the sorting icon?

In List_of_NGC_objects_(1–1000), there is a sortable table... but it doesn't display the sorting icons.

NGC number	Other names	Object type	Constellation	Right ascension (J2000)	Declination (J2000)	Apparent magnitude
a	b	c	d	e	f	g
h	j	i	k	l	m	n

If you remove the style="background:#edf3fe;" element, the icons reappear

NGC number	Other names	Object type	Constellation	Right ascension (J2000)	Declination (J2000)	Apparent magnitude
a	b	c	d	e	f	g
h	j	i	k	l	m	n

This can't be intended? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:59, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

The proper spelling of that style is "background-color", not "background". I can't begin to guess why that interferes with sortable, but change it to that and it works again. —Cryptic 06:12, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

See Help:Sorting#Background colors in sortable headers. phab:T33755 was declined. The issue is that sort arrows are a background image and background overrides such images. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:35, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Maybe somebody should make a list of sortable tables using background instead of background-color in header cells with sort arrows. I guess it's never intentional to override the sort arrows, apart from deliberate demonstrations of the issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:40, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Sounds like it's time for a bot! Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:56, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Not sure if we need that. I fixed them. –Ammarpad (talk) 16:46, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Headbomb is talking about fixing all articles with the issue, not just the one mentioned. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:54, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: style="background:#edf3fe;" is an attribute, not an element - in this case, the element is th, a table header cell. @Cryptic: background-color and background are properties, not styles. They are documented at the CSS 2.1 spec where we find that background is a shorthand for setting five properties (background-color, background-image, background-repeat, background-attachment and background-position) simultaneously. So background:#edf3fe; is a perfectly valid declaration, being equivalent to the five declarations

background-color:#edf3fe;background-image:none;background-repeat:repeat;background-attachment:scroll;background-position:0% 0%;

. There is usually no harm in using the shorthand form, except when you wish that one of its five component properties should be left unaltered. It is that second declaration background-image:none; which is causing the problem, as noted above - the declarations that are being overridden in this manner are:

background-image: url(/w/resources/src/jquery.tablesorter.styles/images/sort_both.png?8b01b);
background-image: linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns=%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22 width=%22…21 9%22%3E %3Cpath d=%22M14.5 5l-4 4-4-4zm0-1l-4-4-4 4z%22/%3E %3C/svg%3E");

the second one is the image that we desire, but not all browsers can handle SVG images in CSS values, so the first declaration (which gives the location of a PNG image) is provided as a fallback for those browsers that can't. Although these images have been suppressed by the implicit background-image:none; the header cells are still sensitive to a mouse click and will sort in the normal manner. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:16, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Special Log doesn't show page creation??

For instance, if I look at [29] or [30] or [31], it doesn't show when the page was created. What gives? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:02, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't think it ever has. Probably something to do with logs originally being for protection/moves and how edits are stored? Killiondude (talk) 05:10, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Is there another way of getting when the page was created / age of the page ? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:13, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

&action=info has that. Killiondude (talk) 05:15, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:29, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

The creation log entry was only added in late June 2018. All three of those pages were created well before then. (Even if they had been created after then, there still might not be a log at that title if they'd been moved there; Sulphur Aeon's a recent example [32] [33].) —Cryptic 06:07, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: This is the start of the creation log. For pages created before then, there are two methods that you can use: the action=info parameter in the URL query string as noted above; this is available in the left margin of every normal page as "Page information"; the second method is to look at the page history and use the "oldest" link to find the first edit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:27, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Should moving a page change its content model in some situations?

Interestingly, I have just created an interface-admin protected page at User:ToBeFree/content-model-test, by creating it as ".js" file first and then moving the page. There is also an edit filter, filter 694, that warns administrators about this possibly unintuitive behavior of MediaWiki. While there are legitimate reasons for changing the default content model of a page, currently being discussed at Wikipedia:Edit_filter_noticeboard#Filter_694_is_too_strict, shouldn't we make this optional or non-default? Or should we at least prevent non-admins from doing this?

In a nutshell: Is this considered to be a bug or a feature? ~ ToBeFree (talk) 01:19, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Feature ... or otherwise pages like Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources/styles.css would have to hackily be in template namespace. The solution to this problem is to unbundle the editcontentmodel right from the admin toolset. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 01:31, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
@Pppery: Couldn't an admin (or, if unbundled, a content model editor) change the content model of an existing page without manually having to hackily use a page move for this task? ~ ToBeFree (talk) 19:29, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
In the left margin of every page there is a "Page information" link. Clicking that yields some tables, the first one of which (Basic information) has a row "Page content model". Admins see a "change" link here, I don't know if non-admins see this. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:47, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Ah, I didn't know about that position. Currently not being displayed on Wikipedia for me; the field just contains the text "JavaScript" for the example page. On a private MediaWiki instance, it appears. I think that bundling this right with extendedconfirmed or autoconfirmed instead of sysop may be reasonable and would not require additional infrastructure. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 20:27, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
@ToBeFree: Agree. From what I recall about the reason for the introduction of this feature, it was restricted to admins because of concern over vandalism that many users won't have the technical know-how to revert, which doesn't apply when the user is trusted enough for other rights. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 21:07, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Worth an RFC? Something like "Who should have the 'editcontentmodel' right?" with suggested options "administrators (status quo)", "extended confirmed users", "(auto)confirmed users", "registered users", "all users"? ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

We probably need to due a little testing too see what may break, but adding this to a group like template editors seems fairly safe, changing the content model of a page isn't something that is often needed. Anyone on betacluster or the like want to do some testing on how this may collide with things like namespace protection, page class (e.g. userjs) protection, etc? — xaosflux ^Talk 21:36, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: In fact, with the exception of creating mass message lists and obvious testing of the feature, it's only been done 40 times or so in the last year. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 22:01, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Which I think is mostly caused by its obscurity. The user right seems natural for page mover and/or template editor.

Anyway, people should review the discussion on phab:T85847, which is the Phab task to grant it to everyone (with at least one familiar face besides my own). --Izno (talk) 00:27, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

If its primarily used to create mass message lists, should we all mass messengers (COI: I'm one) to have this right? I can see the argument for page mover, but why template editor? --DannyS712 (talk) 00:34, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Contentmodel is a sufficiently techie concept to warrant someone with the template editor permission. That aside, there are a few tasks listed in the related links there in that task that would enable certain TE types. One of them is JSON in Module space. --Izno (talk) 00:40, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict with both posts above) I personally buy the argument presented by Xaosflux about difficult-to-revert content-model-change vandalism (assuming that's still true), so would oppose granting it to users not specifically trusted, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to unbundle: I've requested that a page's content model be changed multiple times, and if I were to go rogue I could cause script errors on eight million pages ... {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 00:43, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Oof, why is that at TEP? I thought there was general consensus that transcluded content in the millions range should really be FP. --Izno (talk) 01:03, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) (with probably 4 people!) @DannyS712: because they are involved in more complicated scribunto modules. Think I'd be good with page movers too, assuming we can validate the cases that could break things related to the protection systems. We don't want people being able to back-door create protection issues. As far as MMS, I'm in support of fixing that via phab:T92795. It is almost never feasible to "change" a page to mass-message style since the format will normally be wrong. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:43, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Re: break "lots" of things at once, would also need to validate that contentmodelchange actions don't bypass protection (e.g. if you can't 'edit' a page you shouldn't be able to contentmodelchange it either). — xaosflux ^Talk 00:48, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

I've also been entertaining the (crazy?) idea of doing something like {{navbox-json|Template:Warcraft.json}}, which would enable something like phab:T124168. The template could create the content in a form suitable for desktop, while MobileFrontend could consume the JSON page directly and decide for itself how it wanted to display the navbox. A little harder to create/edit for normal folks, but would be massively productive on mobile. --Izno (talk) 00:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

@Izno: would the calculated value on that function stay in cache (or require regen on each page load) ? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:59, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm not that techie. That said, I'm not sure your question makes sense. --Izno (talk) 01:01, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

@Izno: normally the all generated articles are cached and readers get served the cached versions, this is a reason articles normally don't have much "dynamic" content, or may require "purge" to refresh if something minor transcluded like a navbox is stale. The thing to check (that I don't EXPECT to be a problem) is if this new type of way of constructing articles would spoil that caching for non-logged-in readers. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

MobileFrontend does weird things already that change the layout significantly, like moving the infobox below the first paragraph. I don't expect this would be problematic. --Izno (talk) 01:28, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) That change would, in any case, require consensus, and I would oppose it, as it just seems wrong to me to make any more classes of page not wikitext. (although I believe that the suggestion would not break caching). {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 01:05, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

There's a whole class of people who don't even know navboxes exist. We have to move forward at some point, and I'm willing to explore solutions. (Ignoring whether I think navboxes themselves are valuable.) --Izno (talk) 01:28, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm going to request we add this to templateeditors on testwiki for production testing. Will update with a ticket number soon. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- phab:T217499 created, once it gets done we can do some more serious testing. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
Ugh, the indentation in this section is so screwed up I have no idea where to insert my reply.
I was thinking of proposing such an RFC myself, after running into a situation recently where AnomieBOT couldn't change the content model of User:AnomieBOT/source/wikitable.css itself due to lack of the right and I couldn't do it either due to lack of interface-admin. I wound up working around it by creating the page under a different title and moving it. Anomie ⚔ 03:14, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
What are you talking about? It's perfect. Let's do the test wiki thing, which looks like it will be deployed sooner rather than later. I agree with an RFC. Probably ask the question "Who should this be provided to?" with options being "Page mover", "Template editor", "Status quo (=admins)", "ECP"?, and "other groups", (non-exclusive options) as well as general discussion. Alternatively, we could get the "give it to everyone" task out the door... but yes, regardless we should test it. --Izno (talk) 03:56, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Anomie:} I'm pretty sure that changecontent actions won't override all the other protections you brought up (will be able to test on testwiki soon though). — xaosflux ^Talk 20:52, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
If AnomieBOT had the ability to change content models, things would have been fine. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Anomie ⚔ 23:53, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Wiki markup parsing in Chrome

@User:GoldRingChip and I discovered what seems to be a problem with the way Google Chrome parses some of the markup, particularly around tables.

You can see an illustrated example at User talk:GoldRingChip#Template:US Congress party summary. To make a long story short, the table created by {{US Congress party summary}} is supposed to appear the way the first illustration (a .png file) appears. And sure enough, it appeared that way when I checked it out with Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge. But when I used Google Chrome, the table appeared different. (My description of what I saw is right below; I presume anyone using Chrome will see the same thing that I did.)
Another example is at United States congressional apportionment#Changes following the 2010 census. This table is not generated by a template, but it also has a problem in Chrome.

In both cases, it seems that a rowspan markup is not being interpreted correctly. Does anyone have an idea as to what to do about this? Chrome is a pretty popular browser. StevenJ81 (talk) 23:24, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

- Unless I'm missing something, both the image and the code appear the same to me and I don't see an obvious issue. Chrome 72.0.3626.119 with Windows 10 here. Home Lander (talk) 00:04, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

I guess you have enabled "Make sure that headers of tables remain in view as long as the table is in view" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. This gadget has problems with rowspan in header cells. See MediaWiki talk:Gadget-StickyTableHeaders.css#Bug: rowspan in headers does not propagate into table. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:13, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm confused. GoldRingChip, is File:1st Congress Senate.png the right behaviour or the wrong behaviour? Whichever it is, please also provide a WP:WPSHOT of the other behaviour, and annotate each one to indicate which is which. BTW this screen shot is how I see the table on your talk page; I use Opera 36. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:03, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

The screenshot is the right behaviour. The discussion was confusing because GoldRingChip didn't sign it (fixed), so it looked like a post from StevenJ81 who sees the wrong behaviour. It is almost certainly due to enabling the gadget I mentioned. Here is the discussion with the gadget code enabled via the url. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:50, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter and GoldRingChip: You nailed it, PrimeHunter. Thank you. And, of course, the reason it only appeared wrong in Chrome was that in the other browsers, when I checked for comparison, I was not logged in—so the gadget was not turned on. (I've turned off the gadget now.) StevenJ81 (talk) 17:13, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this up, User:StevenJ81, and thanks for solving this, User:PrimeHunter. I'll delete the image I'd created and we can call this case closed, right? —GoldRingChip 17:30, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Modifications to OneClickArchiver

Putting this here since this script's creator is sitebanned and can't respond. There's a bit of an ongoing issue with OneClickArchiver being misclicked at Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism by administrators, inadvertently creating Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism/Archive 1. That page is salted because AIV is not supposed to be archived, but OCA does not respect protection when it's an admin pushing the button. AIV's talk pages have archives, though, and each time that page is accidentally created and then deleted, Wikipedia talk:Administrator intervention against vandalism/Archive 1 (the first talk archive) goes with it as Twinkle applies WP:G8 to it by default. Is there a way to:

Make OneClickArchiver respect create protection and/or warn when an admin is about to edit through protection (as is usually the case for admins creating/editing protected pages); or
create an exclusion so that OneClickArchiver will not archive a page, say with a {{nobots}} style template?

Thanks in advance. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:42, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Never mind, #2 was already coded into it. Cheers to reading the fucking manual. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:51, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

I would also like to bring up that the same issue was occurring with Wikipedia:Requests for page protection/Archive 1 being repeatedly created. funplussmart (talk) 22:10, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

ToC glich in Binary relation

The Table of Contents at Binary relation does not respond properly to § 5 Homogeneous relation. Rather it links mid-article where "homogeneous relation" is first defined. Evidence of expert over-ride of expected link. — Rgdboer (talk) 01:28, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Rgdboer: Its because it was an anchor, not a section. I have made it a section --DannyS712 (talk) 01:48, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

It was already a section, later on in the article. Now, not only does Binary relation#Homogenous relation not go to its dedicated section, there's another spurious subsection of #Definition titled "Homogenous relation" that that has nothing to do with homogenous relations except for its first sentence. —Cryptic 01:52, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Cryptic: Thanks for fixing it! --DannyS712 (talk) 02:10, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Pump, for promptly ridding the glich. — Rgdboer (talk) 02:49, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Help with parser function

Hi. I'm trying to work out a ParserFunction, but I can't seem to find out a solution to the below requirement

I know {{#if: {{{param1}}} | value if test string is not empty | value if test string is empty}} exists, but what's the best way to work around if there are more arguments, such as:

if [param1=non-blank] [param2=blank] [param3=blank] = Specific-text
if [param1=non-blank] [param2=blank] = Specific text.

Thank you for any help. Reh man 04:16, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Rehman: I think you would have to nest multiple ifs, or use a module. Eg:

{{#if:{{{param1}}} |{{#if:{{{param2}}}| value if 1 non-blank; 2 non-blank | value if 1 non-blank; 2 blank}}| {{#if:{{{param2}}}| value if 1 blank; 2 non-blank | value if 1 blank; 2 blank}}}}

What are you trying to implement? --DannyS712 (talk) 04:23, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you DannyS712, I will try this and update again. I'm trying to automate a part of an infobox. Reh man 04:36, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

You can also consider using 'switch' parser function. Ruslik_Zero 04:30, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi Ruslik. Would you mind showing the working here? I tried, but didn't succeed. Thank you! Reh man 04:36, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Rehman: example: {{Afc redirect}} --DannyS712 (talk) 04:37, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

You should consider using one parameter with multiple possible values rather than multiple parameters with single possible value. Ruslik_Zero 04:42, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Yemen

Hi, while I was trying to look into the history page of Yemen article it came to my attention that there was a huge vandalism that happened 3 days ago here and I can't open it using the mobile version. It seems like a bug. It keeps loading and loading and not opening. This might cause difficulty to those who want to explore the history of this article. I think the edit can be removed in the same way an edit gets removed when there is a copyright materials etc... Thanks.--SharabSalam (talk) 08:51, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

I've hidden the disruptive revision. But it doesn't seem to have solved the problem on the link you provided — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:15, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@SharabSalam: What are exact steps to reproduce the problem? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yemen&action=history loads fine for me but not sure that's what you refer to. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:57, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

AKlapper (WMF) I am talking about this revision Special:MobileDiff/885951515, it is not loading in the mobile version. I think we need to hide it or remove it not sure how that is done. Apparently it is still not loading even after it was hidden. I think this might be a bug or something and we might need to fix this indefinitely because some might find it a useful way to vandalise articles in Wikipedia --SharabSalam (talk) 12:08, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

MSGJ new update. I just checked now and the link is working. Thanks--SharabSalam (talk) 12:10, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

MSGJ, Sorry for this but now I understand what happened. You deleted the edit by the vandal but not the revert by the bot. The revert should be unclickable just like the edit by that vandal.--SharabSalam (talk) 12:24, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@SharabSalam: you can now access the diff page because the revision has been deleted.

@AKlapper (WMF): Before the revision was deleted, the diff page Special:Diff/885951515 cannot be accessed (with Chrome/Safari on Mac), it threw this error instead.

[XIDdbgpAAEEAAA7yk-AAAACG] 2019-03-07 09:00:51: Fatal exception of type "WMFTimeoutException"

Maybe admin can undelete to try it yourself–Ammarpad (talk) 12:49, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Ammarpad: It is accessible. However, there is one more problem which is the revision that is next to it, when someone goes to the history page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yemen&action=history and click on the revert of the vandalism it doesn't load (unlike the deleted revision the reverting revision is clickable). It seems that we need to delete both the vandalism revision and the reverting revision which was made by the cluebot NG.--SharabSalam (talk) 13:14, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Sorry everything is fine. It has been fixed it seems that I needed to refresh my browser. The problem is solved-SharabSalam (talk) 13:21, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Ammarpad: Thanks for that error ID. I can see in the logs that "the execution time limit of 60 seconds was exceeded". If this happens again, filing a bug report (including the error ID) would be welcome. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 13:36, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

JSTOR does not work in Citoid/VE

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T216456

Specifically, [34] and [35] don't generate citations when I try to add them to User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/Qurupuna. Is there a problem with them? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:44, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

This one does not work either. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:49, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Does phab:T216456 sound like the behavior you're seeing? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:19, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF):Yes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:50, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

This also doesn't work. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 07:32, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Some more broken ones: [36],[37],[38],[39] and [40]JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 15:20, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

@Mvolz (WMF): Are these on your list already? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:47, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

I checked a few of these and they all seem to be working now (as expected). This was due to the fact that JSTOR had blocked us, but we contacted them and they whitelisted our IPs. Mvolz (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Followup on Cross_Lang_Conflict_Examples

Hi, this is a section to follow up Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_166#Cross_Lang_Conflicts.

I create a bot User:Xinbenlv_bot and I would like to ask for people's advice who are interested. The goal is to not directly write on Wikipedia page, but to notify interested user through writing on the subject's (article) Talk page.

Request for advice from all of you, and in particular who previously discussed in the thread.

Xinbenlv (talk) 07:57, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I have three pointers. The first two are about how I think the bot should be developed further. It would be much more useful if it could check the sources of the mismatching facts. If one page has a source for the fact in question but the other does not, then the one with the source should always be picked. As such, where there is an source on en.wikipedia but not on de.wikipedia, it would be pointless to notify an user on en.wikipedia. On the other hand, in that case, users on de.wikipedia should be notified about that same fact.

Secondly, the sources also matter in other cases. All wikipedias, and wikidata, use sources to figure out what fact is correct and which one is not. As such, it would be great if the bot could show any difference between the two sources. Or at the very least, there is an html anchor for all sources on a page (f.x. cite-note-5), which the bot should link to, instead of only linking to the page.

Lastly, you should post about your bot on Wikipedia:WikiProject Reliability and see what they think of it. You do have the technical side mostly figured out, so asking users that are in reference checking is going to help you a lot more at this stage than asking around at Village Pump (technical).--Snaevar (talk) 12:46, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Great to see the bot! Yes, start a WP Reliability conversation. Also, it is ok to tell en.wp users about a gap on de.wp (or even moreso, about smaller wikis) -- many editors do update other languages that are not their native one. The important thing is to reach someone who cares about the correct data and is currentlly active. 09:20, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Twinkle

Just a quick question, when you use Twinkle, after performing an action, the browser reloads automatically; does this function come from this code? If not, where?--▸ ‎épine _talk♬ 18:47, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Épine, probably (though I haven't traced the code) from the function Morebits.wiki.actionCompleted.event yes. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:09, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

TheDJ Thanks, Is this code also responsible for leaving notifications on user talks when using PROD and CSD?--▸ ‎épine _talk♬ 10:22, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it's all tied in to Morebits.wiki.page. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 12:53, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2019 March 8

At Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2019 March 8, {{Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eric Walberg}} does not display any link to the AFD. --Jax 0677 (talk) 14:32, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

It's been fixed from the AfD page. –Ammarpad (talk) 14:46, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

SVG getting clipped in media viewer?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T89631

When I view File:Cokernel-02.svg displayed embedded in an article or on its file page, it seems to be okay. However when I view it in the media viewer (at least for me; courtesy ping to Simple Symbol who brought it up), just a little bit on the right-hand side seems to be cut off, so the prime on the $Q'$ in the lower-right gets lost, and it just looks like a plain $Q$ . Is this any sort of known issue; are there workarounds? Thanks, –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 01:52, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

@Deacon Vorbis: It used to cut off larger portion before but the problem was partially solved in 2015. See the phab task.–Ammarpad (talk) 08:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, but that was exclusively talking about the bottom of the image, and not the right (could be happening on the left for all I know, but the particulars of this image make it obvious on the right). Are we sure this is related? –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 14:41, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

You're right, they're not the same but they're related (it's all about resizing done by MV). You can file a new bug report for this. –Ammarpad (talk) 14:51, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

.ogg and iOS incompatibility

Greetings from the Teahouse where we have informed a questioner (here) that they will never be able to listen on their iPad or iPhone to .ogg files (or music created via <score>...</score>) because iOS and .ogg files are incompatible.

Having tried to search the VP archives, I find nothing to suggest this issue seems likely to be addressed any time soon. Is that the right answer to give, or are efforts being made to give iOS users access to this or alternative forms of audio content? Many thanks, Nick Moyes (talk) 14:47, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Seems the .ogg issue is being addressed at T68722. –Ammarpad (talk) 15:01, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. I guessed someone might know. But I won't held my breath! Cheers, Nick Moyes (talk) 15:19, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

detecting disambiguation pages?

What's the right way to tell that a page is a disambiguation page? (I'm thinking about mechanical ways, for robots, not for peoples' eyeballs.) Looking for the presence of the {{Disambiguation}} template looks like a good first start, but I don't know how reliable it'd be -- for example, there might be other, equally good disambiguation templates or categories out there that can be used instead. —Steve Summit (talk) 16:53, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

@Scs: See mw:Extension:Disambiguator - all disambiguation pages should be tagged as __DISAMBIG__, usually transcluded through the template --DannyS712 (talk) 17:42, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Anything in Category:Disambiguation and redirection templates including sub-cats and template aliases (see "What links here" for each). There are also set index pages Category:Set index article templates. Even then, not all pages are properly tagged. Depending how you define a dab page there even more to consider. -- GreenC 18:17, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

You'd want to use the API provided by Extension Disambiguation ( mw:Extension:Disambiguator#With API ). Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:52, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, all. —Steve Summit (talk) 19:00, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Where did the standard/old stand-by edit menu go?

Help, please! I have had a standard "edit menu" appear as my default when editing pages since I don't know when. Ten years? Something long. In the past two weeks or so (perhaps longer) it has been replaced by a much less useful, more "graphic" menu (that lists fewer commands, even including those on its drop-down menus).

How do I get the old one back? I did not change any preference settings, the menu changed itself. I first noticed the switch in Internet Explorer, then with some time-lag the same more cartoonish, less utilitarian menu appeared on Google Chrome. I assumed it might have been an artifact, perhaps caused by not having sufficient RAM available to support the regular edit menu. It wasn't; a reboot did not restore the historic one. I would really like it back. How? Yours, Wikiuser100 (talk) 12:20, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

@Wikiuser100: Does this help? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:11, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, User talk:Redrose64. Best I can make out the editor I had been using should still be available, and somehow has been displaced by the one for Visual Editor (which I do not use). Please see below. Wikiuser100 (talk) 17:26, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

See also mw:Editor, which has screenshots of various editing environments, so you can figure out which one you're looking at. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:39, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF), indeed the screenshots are key. According to them I used to have Extension:WikiEditor. Clicking on that link takes one to a page here which says three things: 1) that WikiEditor is an extension; 2) it is automatically bundled in with MediaWiki 1.18; and 3) all those bundled features are in currently in place. I can't tell you when that statement was added to that page, but the page is current enough (This page was last edited on 16 February 2019, at 08:53.) that it predates the menu problems I have been experiencing, and continue to.

Help is again plead for, and much appreciated. I would really love a useful edit menu back. Thank you. Yours, Wikiuser100 (talk) 17:26, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Wikiuser100: You probably need to go into the Beta features tab of Special:Preferences and remove the checkmark next to "New wikitext mode". --Izno (talk) 19:11, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, User:Izno, but it's not checked. None of the beta features are. Plus I tried toggling "Enable the editing toolbar" at Mediawiki Special:Preferences, to no effect. Keep those ideas coming! Thanks. Yours, Wikiuser100 (talk) 19:17, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Wikiuser100: Your last comment is unclear. You mean Special:Preferences on this wiki or Special:Preferences at MediaWiki? --Izno (talk) 19:23, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Izno: At the Mediawiki Special:Preferences. There is no option for that editor among the Beta features at Wikipedia Special:Preferences. But just to make sure I did not overlook one, I enabled all Beta features there, saved my preferences, then unchecked that box (which then required manually unchecking every feature that was listed, but still no Extension:WikiEditor, a feature enabled in Wikipedia with the 2010 adoption of MediaWiki 1.18). Thanks. Yours, Wikiuser100 (talk) 19:32, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikiuser100, which toolbar are you trying to get rid of?

@Whatamidoing (WMF):Actually there is nothing like it at this page. It's quite limited, and has bulky cartoonish looking icons.

I also can't find the menu I used to have (for at least a decade or more) at that page, either. The closest is what is labeled "The 2006 JavaScript editor" at the bottom of that same page - except the menu I had spanned two lines and included more functionality, similar to some of the additional features in the Extension:WikiEditor image near the top of that page, like the three boxes for text alignment. I see that menu used to be the default expanded menu 2006-2010, then became the "enhanced editor" (2010 Wiki) until MediaWiki 1.32 became permanent January 10 this year. Do I smell a smoking gun...?

Is there any way to paste in a screencap of what is appearing now without uploading the image at Commons (or Wikipedia's equivalent)? Thanks. Yours, Wikiuser100 (talk) 20:06, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Uploading Wikipedia:Screenshots of Wikipedia is the only way to get it on this page. I've sent you an e-mail message, and if you want, you can reply to that. Alternatively, some people have accounts at image places, and prefer to upload there and post the link publicly. We could also open a Phabricator ticket, which would let you drag-and-drop the image in. For example, I just dropped in a screenshot from the mobile visual editor at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F28348792 (which shows yet another toolbar). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Also, have you checked Special:GlobalPreferences, which can override your local settings? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Tried it. Toggled things on and off. No dice. Yours, Wikiuser100 (talk) 20:06, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Followed pages

Is there way to mark these pages in certain category I don't follow yet with a different colour? Eurohunter (talk) 20:50, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Subject bar not used in mobile view

There's a technical problem about sister links not being seen in mobile view that perhaps someone here could remedy....pls see Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2019 March 3 #‎Template:Subject bar.--Moxy (talk) 22:40, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

What the subject bar template can do

Can someone explain what the technical reason for this is? (Also: can we override the clunky "Related articles" stuff at the bottom of the Mobile View?) Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:47, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Module:Subject bar appears to set the 'navbox' class, which makes it invisible on the mobile website. This is generally done for templates that will be difficult or outright illegible on smartphones. A few minutes looking at what happens to Argon#See also on a narrow screen suggests that this setting has likely been correctly applied in that instance. The "solution" would likely involve re-designing the template to not create a wide table.

For those who don't know what Related Pages is, it's sort of like pre-loaded search results for the next three pages that people are likely to want (based on the title of the page they're reading now). I don't know whether there's a separate pref it, although as a general rule, mobile-focused features don't have separate prefs. Previous research on the English Wikipedia showed that when they're seen (i.e., the reader scrolls down to that part of the page), they use those links about 6% of the time, which is a large effect. AFAICT no similar research has been done on navboxes. We (the editors at this wiki) have invested many, many thousands of hours into building navboxes, but we don't actually know if readers use them. The most that we can say is that navboxes have been hidden on mobile for years, and that the number of complaints I've personally seen about that over the years, from people who don't have hundreds or thousands of edits, could be counted on my fingers, with plenty of fingers left over. Based on that admittedly incomplete information, if I were choosing between navboxes and Related Pages for most readers, I'd choose Related Pages. For people like us, though: if you don't like it, the Readers devs have been pretty good about defining separate classes for content, so you could probably use CSS to hide it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Argon#See also looks alright to me. On a narrow screen it becomes a vertical bar, which is what I'd force it into if I was adding special class for a mobile view. Whether that's desirable I'm not so sure, as it's main job is to route to the portals. I personally use the navboxes a lot, but never use the links to sister projects. The subject bar keeps the sister projects boxes with the portals in a compact group and preserves the layout. It's understood that with less screen real estate to work with, the mobile view has to involve compromises.
With regard to the Related articles, what I'd really like to do is not suppress it, but give it some hints. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:36, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

I've uploaded a screenshot of that template. I agree that it looks fine, for some people, on some screens, at some font sizes. The screenshot I'm adding above shows one of the other outcomes.

Related Pages's method of choosing articles to list is a little more sophisticated now than just "what are the top three results if you search this page title?" (which was their first algorithm), but it's not necessarily very different from that in practice. mw:Extension:RelatedArticles#Usage seems to have the code for manually overriding the default search results in a given article. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:11, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

SVG colours

I'm having a minor issue with SVG colouration at Template:Bristol and Gloucester Railway Line. This happens in Firefox (65.0.1) but does not happen in Safari (12.0.2) or Tor Browser (8.0.6; Firefox 60.5.1esr).

In the table row that contains "Bristol Parkway":

One of the images, (exSTR+l), is coloured #d77f7e in Firefox 65.0.1. This is the same as its actual RGB hex triplet in the SVG code. However, in both other browsers, the image is coloured #cc8481.
The other SVGs which use the same colour – (exSTRl~R), (exSTR~R), (exdCONTfq) and (exdv-STR) – are coloured #cc8481 in all three browsers.

This issue also occurs with some of the other images on the page; e.g. (HST) is #be2d2c (the actual RGB hex triplet) but (ABZ4+3f) is #b03730.

Additionally, all PNG thumbnails except for 20px, 30px and 40px are rendered with #cc8481 (and only in Firefox 65.0.1), whereas the 20px, 30px and 40px PNGs are rendered with #d77f7e. I don't know if it's possible to purge those three images.

Is this an issue with Firefox or an issue with librsvg? I filed phab:T180899 in 2017 but I don't know if it's the exact same issue. In 2017, purging the image pages on Commons would update the thumbnails, but this is no longer the case. Jc86035 (talk) 11:21, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps the intended colour is being altered to a web safe colour. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:09, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't think that's likely. Almost all modern displays should be capable of displaying all sRGB colours, and the closest "web-safe colours" are #c99 and #c66, which are relatively far away from #cc8481 and #d77f7e respectively.

Interestingly, Inkscape and Safari are both unable to open the 40px PNG but are able to open the 41px PNG. Jc86035 (talk) 16:35, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

I purged

(exSTR+l) by reverting on the file twice. The issue ~~no longer appears~~ temporarily disappears on that file but does still appear on others. Jc86035 (talk) 16:39, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I've filed a Firefox bug for the issue, since it appears to be unrelated to librsvg. Jc86035 (talk) 08:47, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Dupes of JS Wiki Browser

Tool menu on left shows 2 JS Wiki Browser links

I can't recall where I got JS Wiki Browser, and can't seem to find it on WP. I also don't know how I ended-up with 2 copies of it, or maybe it's an isolated duplicate in the left hand Tools menu. I included a screen capture showing the dupe entry under tools. Can someone tell me how to remove both? I don't use wiki browser and would like to eliminate it. ^Atsme 📣 📧 17:03, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

@Atsme: You installed JWB to your global.js in February 2018 (diff) and to your common.js in December 2018 (diff). This gives you two copies. To uninstall it, just undo the edits. --Danski454 (talk) 17:14, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Perfect!! Thank you, Danski454. ^Atsme 📣 📧 17:25, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Need a debug why some page previews have an image and some not

Page preview of Doberman Pinscher on Chrome/Mac (default zoom)

I'm trying to debug why some links to dog breed articles are not showing an image in the popup "page preview" even though there is an image in the article (usually in the infobox) while other breed pages show an image during a page preview. I've checked the code for the pages (Edit source), but I can't find anything telling it to show an image or not, and I can't find any patterns. Does anyone know why some show and some do not? I've provided several instances for examples. (My secondary question is why some images show on top of text and others show side-by-side with the text.)

Hover over the breed name links below.

Example 1: These pages show the image to the right of text: Wolf, Yorkshire Terrier, American Pit Bull Terrier, Fila Brasileiro

Example 2: These pages show the image above the text: Wolfdog, Akita, Dingo, German Shepherd, Welsh Terrier

Example 3: These pages do NOT show any image in the page preview: Doberman Pinscher, Bull Terrier, Perro de Presa Canario, South Russian Shepherd Dog, Boerboel, Giant Schnauzer

If anyone can tell me what needs to be changed for the Example 3 ones, please let me know. I have a LOT of other pages I want to fix.

—Nomopbs (talk) 04:32, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

I am not sure why but Doberman Pinscher and Perro de Presa Canario both show images to me (above the text) and you say they're not showing any. I think the best available explanation of how PagePreview works is here, so I don't think it's advisable to go and fiddle with several images across pages just for the sake of that as it's clear there would always be inconsistency.

To give you an idea of how complicated this could be, see this ANI thread, a vandal made includeonly transclusion of Exhibitionism into template {{Campaignbox Idlib demilitarization and frozen conflict}}. The template itself is transcluded to {{Campaignbox Syrian Civil War}} which is further transcluded to target article Timeline of the Syrian Civil War (January–April 2019). Despite all these transclusions, the target article decided to use the image from Exhibitionism for pagePreview, and even worse it still uses the image 26 hours after the vandalism was reverted. As I write this, 06:48, 9 March 2019 (UTC) it's still the page image. It's not black-and-white issue. –Ammarpad (talk) 06:48, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

I'll read the more technical parts tomorrow, but you did give me an idea since you said you could see Dobermann and Perro de Presa Canario. I tried three different browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Windows Explorer, and Chrome). I got the same results with all three. It was worth a shot, since I've noticed other differences between browsers before. I am now quite curious how YOU got to see photos and I can't. —Nomopbs (talk) 07:40, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

I added a screenshot. I think that suffices. –Ammarpad (talk) 07:58, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't see a page image for Doberman Pinscher and Perro de Presa Canario with default zoom. If I zoom out to 67% and reload the page after the zooming then I get images. In many browsers, press Ctrl++ for larger, Ctrl+- for smaller, Ctrl+0 for default. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:13, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Hot dang! I zoomed out to 60% and refreshed and I, too, can see a photo preview for Dobermann and Presa Canario. The other four on the list... BZZZZZT! No go. Curiouser and curiouser! Nomopbs (talk) 10:45, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

But I took the above screenshot using the default zoom. –Ammarpad (talk) 11:24, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Maybe it's because you have a wide screen. I have an old 5:4 screen. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:53, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

The aspect ratio is likely controlling the placement on the card—images closer to be being portrait at put to the right of the card, whereas images closer to being landscape are put at the top. Images that have an extreme aspect ratio, such as being significantly wider than they are tall, tend not to be selected as page images, as it's they don't fit usefully in most places where a page image would be useful. --Deskana (talk) 12:51, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

High-use templates not updating

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T132467

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T157670

About two weeks ago, I made this edit, which should have the effect of orphaning Module:Calendar, however the module still has ~200,000 transclusions, many of which go away when you null-edit the page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 22:08, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

You can only wait. Ruslik_Zero 04:31, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

This is a long-standing feature request. It takes somewhere between days and forever for the servers to null-edit all affected pages. See the two Phab requests I have linked from the top of this section. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:32, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Help with the Kartographer extension

<mapframe>: Couldn't parse JSON: Control character error, possibly incorrectly encoded

This map is supposed to display all the federal subjects of Russia; it seems to work well enough, but there is one entity, Smolensk Oblast (to the west, bordering Belarus) that is not being selected. The Wikidata query correctly lists the oblast, and the OSM relation is properly linked to the Wikidata qid. Any help is much appreciated.--eh bien mon prince (talk) 13:28, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Pages where node count is exceeded

Category:Pages where node count is exceeded is normally empty but now has five pages:

Any thoughts on how to handle that? Blanking the pages as unhelpful clutter might just encourage the bot to generate the whole thing again. Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books does not appear to be active. I wonder how many of these pages exist, and how much unused wikitext they contain. Johnuniq (talk) 06:26, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

I just found User:cyberbot I#NoomBot which points to Category:Wikipedia books (community books) which has 6,136 pages. Johnuniq (talk) 06:30, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

On these five pages, the bot is failing to delete the previous content before writing the new report. Compare the history of Book talk:A Day to Remember or Book talk:Aikido (random choices), with minor changes to the page size, with the history of these pages with a huge increase in size each time. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:28, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Pinging the bot operator Cyberpower678. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:25, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

I've come across problems with Cyberbot I (talk · contribs) in Book talk: space before. It can apparently be confused by certain link formats; if you look at these edits (where I needed several attempts to figure out how to get the bot to behave sensibly) you may find features in common with the recent problem pages. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:05, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

As an easy experiment, I blanked Book talk:Japan to see whether that will allow the bot to work correctly. Johnuniq (talk) 08:50, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

file name determination

I want to know how an editor is supposed to find out more about an audio file as used by "listen" templates.

For example, templates such as IPAc-en use (via a LUA module) the audio template to offer a clickable link to .ogg files.

But this does not link to the "File" where more info can be found - the uploader, file history and so on. (For instance, if you want to learn who made the recording (whose voice you hear), this page is where you would want to go in order to ask the uploader).

Instead (as far as I can see) the audio template uses the :Media: prefix. This means the sound file link becomes something like upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.ogg. Which is not the useful commons:File:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.ogg

How and where are the "upload" link generated (the ".../4/46..." business)?
How are you supposed to find out more about the sound file given a page like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? In other words, how to best get from there to here: commons:File:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.ogg (Feel free to take it step by step: "click here, then click there...")

Thank you.

PS. I first asked here: Wikipedia_talk:Lua#upload_/_file_determination If this is not the proper place to ask either, feel free to point me to a third place :-)

CapnZapp (talk) 10:04, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

I guess you mean this: /ˌsuːpərˌkælɪˌfrædʒɪˌlɪstɪkˌɛkspiˌælɪˈdoʊʃəs/

I see a speaker icon linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.ogg. Don't you? If you want the Commons file page then click the Commons icon at the top right of File:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.ogg, or click "description page there" in the box at the top. The "listen" link is made with [[:Media:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.ogg|listen]]. MediaWiki automatically assigns hex numbers like "/4/46" based on the file name. Editors don't have to worry about that. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:48, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-11

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

Pages can use geocoordinates from Wikidata with the mw.wikibase.entity:formatStatements Lua function or the #statements parser function. If they do, they will now be shown using a Kartographer <maplink> if the wiki can use Kartographer. You can report bugs or ask questions on Phabricator.
There is now an EventStream to see when links are added or removed on Wikimedia wikis. You can read the discussions and plans.

Problems

Some wikis will not be able to edit for a short period of time on 19 March (UTC). This will start at 15:00 UTC. It will last up to 15 minutes but probably shorter. You can see the list of affected wikis. This is because of network maintenance. You can still read the wikis.
Editors who use Firefox to edit with the visual editor had a problem with copying text. When they tried to select text that included footnotes, templates or block images in the middle they would often only get part of the text. This has now been fixed. [41]
Some maps didn't work for a while on 8 March. This has been fixed. [42][43]

Changes later this week

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19:29, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Small tags

While fixing some unclosed tag linter errors, I came across an interesting issue:

This is normal-size text. There is an opening <small> here:

This is small text that ends with a </small> tag.

This is text that is expected to be normal size, but is, instead small. This will happen until there is a </small> tag enountered, like here: It happens only when that small text above is indented four or more levels (with :/*/#). With 0–3 indents, things work normally. Put the opening <small> after the indenting markup (along with the closing </small> on the same or other similarly indented line), or put the closing </small> after the indented lines, and it works as expected.

My guess is that you just need to be careful that any kind of font-styling is coded so as to have no danger of crossing <span> (or <div>?) boundaries.

Is this a feature or a bug? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 01:50, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

This is expected; it is how the specification reads for Remex, which is the software extension used for final rendering.

Now, My guess is that you just need to be careful that any kind of font-styling is coded so as to have no danger of crossing <span> (or <div>?) boundaries. Any boundaries of any elements: There is a misnested linter category as well. :) --Izno (talk) 02:23, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Small tags that enclose manual line breaks are not valid in HTML5, as far as I know (I could definitely be wrong about this). You need to wrap each element in its own small tag, or use a template like {{smalldiv}}. See mw:Help:Extension:Linter/misnested-tag for some additional, though minimal, explanation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:50, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Small tags are inline elements; they can only enclose text or other inline elements, but may be enclosed by anything. Indentation using colons makes a (misused, but we'll let that pass) definition list; lists are block elements: they may enclose anything, but may only be enclosed by other block elements. So enclosing indentation in <small>...</small> is forbidden. This is all part of the HTML spec, and it's been like that since lists were first introduced way back in HTML 2.0 (1995) although it wasn't formalised until HTML 3.2 (1997). If you want a list as a whole to be rendered in small text, there are two main methods: first, add either style="font-size:small;" or style="font-size:85%;" to the <dl> tag (not easy in Wiki markup); second, enclose the whole list in either <div style="font-size:small;">...</div> or <div style="font-size:85%;">...</div>. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:49, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Year category redirects

Two category redirects populated by templates that are a nightmare to edit to empty. Can anyone fix the following:

Thanks in advance. Timrollpickering (Talk) 13:25, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

{{Year in country category}} has an undocumented |nocat=yes parameter but it removes all categories. {{replace}} can be used to remove a chosen category from template output by replacing its code with empty.[44] It requires a string match to the used category code. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:31, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Special:ExpandTemplates can be used to find the exact code to match. The method may stop working later if {{Year in country category}} changes. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:25, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

asterisk (*) or numbered (#) list

If there is a picture

Roses in the Sydney Botanical Gardens

together with an asterisk list

Both the Australian Heritage Register, Australian States (e.g. NSW, VIC) and the National Trust of Australia protect heritage gardens and trees, but Local Authorities normally only list and protect built properties rather than their heritage-listed gardens alone.
Tasmanian Heritage Protection is uniquely troubling for ensuring Australian heritage protection:

Because the National Trust of Tasmania has no list of registered properties available publicly, these garden listings will be news for many Tasmanian heritage enthusiasts (The Tas. National Trust even has no Wikipedia page). The Register of the Tasmanian National Trust is being built by volunteer(s) here.
Similarly, the Tasmanian Heritage Register is constructed just of addresses, rather than with the discernible reason why a property is heritage listed (An enquirer must apply directly to the THR office for the heritage document for each address).
The Tasmanian Heritage Register is being deliberately reduced in size, and currently over 500 Hobart locations are due for heritage removal

Similar heritage lists on Wikipedia include the List of historic homesteads in Australia, the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland, and The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty in the UK.

why can't the list not miss the photo? (Note that only bull / number are hidden – actually text is right.)

Roses in the Sydney Botanical Gardens

Both the Australian Heritage Register, Australian States (e.g. NSW, VIC) and the National Trust of Australia protect heritage gardens and trees, but Local Authorities normally only list and protect built properties rather than their heritage-listed gardens alone.
Tasmanian Heritage Protection is uniquely troubling for ensuring Australian heritage protection:

Because the National Trust of Tasmania has no list of registered properties available publicly, these garden listings will be news for many Tasmanian heritage enthusiasts (The Tas. National Trust even has no Wikipedia page). The Register of the Tasmanian National Trust is being built by volunteer(s) here.
Similarly, the Tasmanian Heritage Register is constructed just of addresses, rather than with the discernible reason why a property is heritage listed (An enquirer must apply directly to the THR office for the heritage document for each address).
The Tasmanian Heritage Register is being deliberately reduced in size, and currently over 500 Hobart locations are due for heritage removal

Similar heritage lists on Wikipedia include the List of historic homesteads in Australia, the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland, and The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty in the UK.

Is there an easy way for doing? – Talk about confusing (talk) 08:14, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Talk about confusing, this is the {{flowlist}} problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:16, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Boxes

Talk:List_of_common_misconceptions#Boxes

Could we perhaps move all the nifty little boxes at the top to a subpage?

They make the page load noticeably slower on older browsers.

Is it really necessary to have the to do lists of all those wikiprojects?

A lot of people in poor countries don't have the fast computers that are so ubiquitous here in the developed world, and we should be mindful of that.

Benjamin (talk) 02:10, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for this comment, Benjamin. Would you please post it at mw:Talk:Talk pages consultation 2019?

User:Jdforrester (WMF), is this part of phab:T132072, or is there a more specific Phab ticket for it? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Maybe. Though it'd be conceivable to use whatever underlying system would be built for T132072 to represent a great deal of the boxes at the top of that talk page into metadata about the page itself, I hadn't proposed it for general free-form content notices like the "Inclusion Criteria" box. That'd be prone to serious ab- and mis-use which could be yet another impediment to users in the best case, and more likely, would render the entire system into Yet Another Banner Blindness issue where careful editors' notices are effectively invisible to the very readers at whom they'd be targeted. Something to ponder. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:00, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Regex character sequence for line breaks/newlines in searching

Is there a regex character sequence for line breaks/newlines in Wikipedia's search engine? I want to make a regex search for these in the template search space:

}}

<noinclude>

that excludes these hits from the results:

}}<noinclude>

So, to achieve the result described above, what should I place between insource:/\}\} and \<noinclude/i in this regex search:

insource:/\}\}\<noinclude/i

85.76.133.225 (talk) 18:25, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately there is not a metacharacter for newlines. That's phab:T135280 (and there might be another hanging around--pretty sure I've seen more extensive documentation of the problem). --Izno (talk) 19:23, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

(Oh, I know what I was thinking of--VisualEditor/WTE17 can't handle newlines either in their F+R. --Izno (talk) 19:28, 11 March 2019 (UTC))

It's a documented problem; insource searches seem like something that is going to be really wonderful, but they are only pretty good. See mw:Help:CirrusSearch (do a find on the page for "newline"). You could try this though: insource:/[^\}]\}\}[^\} \|]\<noinclude/i which says "not a curly brace, then two curly braces, then any character except a curly brace, space, or pipe, then a noinclude opening tag". – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:33, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. I tweaked that a little bit by adding one more [^\} \|] into it (like this: insource:/[^\}]\}\}[^\} \|][^\} \|]\<noinclude/i), and now ~90% of the search results seem to be what I was looking for. Surely with a little more tweaking the results could be sharpened even more, but this does it for me for now. If someone's curious, this regex search helps finding templates that, when transcluded, add redundant blank space into articles. So nothing critical, just minor aesthetic blemishes in most cases. 85.76.141.233 (talk) 21:42, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Could someone please copy that search code to some appropriate documentation page? Otherwise, there will be needless wheel-re-inventing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

I have copied it to the mw:Help:CirrusSearch, for lack of a better repository. It sure would be nice if \n worked in insource searches, though. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:14, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Naked man appearing on mouseover on certain in India/Pakistan-related articles

Over at WP:TH we have just received this report from a helpful IP editor about a naked man image appearing on mouseover on certain conflict articles about India and Pakistan. We've checked and mouseover-ed every single linked article at {{Kashmir conflict}}, {{Indo-Pakistani relations}}, {{Military of India}} and {{Military of Pakistan}}, and have identified just the following six articles. We cannot find any inserted images, no common editing pattern nor any other obvious cause of the wrong image displaying:

This was also found and reverted, but the problem seems more subtle, and is still present. Thoughts and actions please? Nick Moyes (talk) 00:11, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I have been unable to reproduce this. It would be helpful if somebody who can reproduce it would report what browser, operating system and skin (monobook, vector, etc) they're using. I can't think of any reason those would be important, but that's the standard list of information to gather when trying to diagnose hard-to-reproduce display problems. With enough reports, a pattern may emerge. -- RoySmith (talk) 00:26, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- Also, if you're using a browser which supports incognito mode, try viewing the page in an incognito window. See if that makes any difference. -- RoySmith (talk) 00:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
TonyBallioni, did you find anything exciting? Drmies (talk) 00:40, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- Not particularly. It's one of the porn vandals. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:42, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Sorry @RoySmith and TonyBallioni: - I didn't even think that might be relevant. I am viewing using Vector skin, Chrome browser (Version 72.0.3626.119 (Official Build) (64-bit)). And since I posted (purged and retested) these six links, now, only Operation Gibraltar and Operation Grand Slam are showing the naked man on mouseover. The other four show nothing. But in Incognito mode, the naked man appears on mouseover only on Operation Grand Slam - not the other five. Nick Moyes (talk) 00:44, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Nick Moyes: for me (without incognito) its now only grand slam - maybe try purging chrome's image cache? Ctrl-f5 works for me. --DannyS712 (talk) 00:48, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@DannyS712: And in Firefox 65.0.1 (64-bit) - which I've not used for many, many months, only Operation Grand Slam now shows the naked man in non-private mode.) Nick Moyes (talk) 00:54, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I can "see" it using wget https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Operation_Grand_Slam right now. So it's not a browser caching issue at least. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 00:48, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Is the image seen the lede image at Nudity? Abecedare (talk) 00:49, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Abecedare: yes --DannyS712 (talk) 00:50, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, probably that image, but there is another one extremely similar to it on Commons, too. I'm not very good at recognising naked men, I'm afraid! Nick Moyes (talk) 00:52, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict)x3 It's

"thumbnail":{"source":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Anterior_view_of_human_male%2C_retouched.jpg/213px-Anterior_view_of_human_male%2C_retouched.jpg","width":213,"height":320},"originalimage":{"source":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Anterior_view_of_human_male%2C_retouched.jpg","width":3216,"height":4824}

Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 00:55, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

So it could be persisting effects of this edit. ISP-level caching issues? Abecedare (talk) 00:52, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Operation Grand Slam looks good now to me, any more pages? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:54, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Operation Grand Slam is now clear, but I'm now re-seeing more "rocks" than I would have expected at Operation Gibraltar, though it was previously not showing. Have purged both this and the article page before reporting back.! Nick Moyes (talk) 01:01, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Nick Moyes: Do you also see the image listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Operation_Gibraltar? I don't. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 01:04, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Suffusion of Yellow: Following that link just gives me one massively long text string, I'm afraid. (Just for clarity, I'm not seeing these naked man images in any of the articles themselves, nor any odd image files, nor mischievous templates. At this time, only Operation Gibraltar is still revealing the naked man image on my PC) Nick Moyes (talk) 01:11, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Nick Moyes: can you try a different browser? — xaosflux ^Talk 01:34, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: I have just upgraded to Firefox 65.0.2 (64-bit), from 65.0.01, and there are no inappropriate images now showing in Firefox, nor in my old Google Chrome browser now, either. Nick Moyes (talk) 01:43, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

FWIW earlier I made WP:NULLEDITs to some, but not all, of those pages a few minutes before the problem disappeared for me. It's possible other users were doing the same. It certainly didn't have an immediate effect, so it may be coincidence, but it should be worth trying if this happens again. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 01:46, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Suffusion of Yellow: just FYI on Operation Grand Slam I top-added another image and removed it to try to regen the thumbnail cache as well (also made some null edits around). — xaosflux ^Talk 01:54, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Archive/Index page not moved to new page

The page Talk:African-American civil rights movement (1954–1968)/Archive index was not moved when article was moved to Civil rights movement. Also, how do I display "Index" with the numbered links to archived pages on the talk page? Mitchumch (talk) 11:13, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

I have moved the index to Talk:Civil rights movement/Archive index. This automatically displays a link in the archives list at Talk:Civil rights movement. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:27, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing that. There appear to be more issues with the archive list as follows:

There are five links within the list that don't seem to work. They are all at the bottom of the list as follows:

External links modified - Talk:African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968)#External links modified
Quick grammar edit - Talk:African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968)#Quick grammar edit
External links modified - Talk:African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968)#External links modified
How to describe the Emmett Till case in the lead sentence of the Emmett Till article - Talk:African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968)#How to describe the Emmett Till case in the lead sentence of the Emmett Till article
Semi-protected edit request on 1 June 2017 - Talk:African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968)#Semi-protected edit request on 1 June 2017

They appear to be "Archive 11" entries.

Portions of "Archive 11" entries are missing entirely from the archive index list. Those missing portions are the first three and last three entries in that archive.
Archives 12, 13, and 14 aren't listed at all in the archive index list.
The first entry in "Archive 1" is missing and is titled "First message".Mitchumch (talk) 00:11, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Give it time. Talk:Civil rights movement/Archive index has not been updated since June 2017 where Archive 11 was created. The index was moved to the current title yesterday. User:HBC Archive Indexerbot/OptIn says you must create the index page. It exists now at the right title so it will hopefully be updated in a coming bot run. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:47, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. I'll keep you posted. Mitchumch (talk) 02:02, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

User:HBC Archive Indexerbot/OptIn states on its user page "DEACTIVATED". Am I missing something? Mitchumch (talk) 02:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Right below there is a box saying: "HBC Archive Indexerbot has been replaced but these instructions are still correct. The archive indexing function is being performed by Legobot." Legobot has updated the index for years while the page said this. The mobile version may display the text without a box. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:57, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Legobot updated 292 article index pages in 11 minutes on 26 April 2018. Since then it has only updated one or two indexes at a time. It's mostly a few pages starting with "A" which keep being updated. There are many reports of missing indexing in the archives at User talk:Legobot and User talk:Legoktm. Legoktm has not replied. No user talk index has been updated since 20 June 2017. Legobot does other tasks but I guess the indexing task should be marked as inactive. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:44, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

This "make archive indices" task sounds much more suited to a Lua module than a bot to me. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 19:35, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

I've coded a rough draft of said lua module at Module:Archive index. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 21:46, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

At this rate, it won't be long before my edit count starts going down because of the number of bot edits I've caused to not happen. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 00:09, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Everything looks good now. Thanks. Mitchumch (talk) 07:58, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Current season in Template:Infobox handball league

Can someone change so that the current season text and image is shown in the downmost part of the infobox, such as in Template:Infobox football league. It looks really weird at for example Handbollsligan otherwise.Jonteemil (talk) 09:10, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

User:IM-yb was the user that changed it from the bottom to the top, why?Jonteemil (talk) 09:18, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Failed page move

Talk:African-American civil rights movement (1896–1954)/Archive 1 was not moved when article title changed to Talk:Civil rights movement (1896–1954). Mitchumch (talk) 22:45, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Done {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 22:50, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Secondary ToC template

How do I create a secondary Template:Toc in the article Betty Boop? I'm trying to place this template in the "Filmography" section. I want the years to appear within this secondary Toc, but not appear in the primary Toc shown at the top of the page. Mitchumch (talk) 22:53, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Please ignore request. I've split the article. Mitchumch (talk) 04:26, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Ephemeral spurious CAPTCHA on Alice Eagly

Hi, just want to report that when I edited Alice Eagly diff here the article was in some kind of ephemeral state where any edit, no matter how trivial, would cause the "You have added external links" CAPTCHA to come up. The CAPTCHA would come up even if I edited the whole article and not just a section. Another piece of information which may be significant is that I often block Javascript. After making that edit, the problem disappeared. 192.118.27.253 (talk) 08:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

If on base page template?

Howdy all. So I have a template that is being called in multiple template's documnetations. I would like to use it to add the parent template to a tracking category. So for example if I add the template to {{foo/doc}} it would place {{foo}} in the category but NOT {{foo/doc}}. I'm looking for a function/template that does this. Isn't there some sort of "if on base page" function? Any help is greatly appreciated! Please {{ping|zackmann08}}. --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 22:10, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: Please see WP:Magic. You can use {{BASEPAGENAME}} to get the result you would like. 2405:204:130C:AF29:C8F:A00F:42DA:D56B (talk) 22:35, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

No that isn't what I'm looking for... I don't need the base page's name... I need to know whether or not I am on the basepage... --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 22:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

{{Sandbox other}} or maybe {{When on basepage}}.--Gonnym (talk) 22:46, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Have a look at a template /doc page that was created recently by using the [create] link upper right of the green doc box. For example, the last one that I created is Template:WikiProject Sanitation/doc which includes:

<includeonly>{{sandbox other||
<!-- Categories below this line, please; interwikis at Wikidata -->

}}</includeonly>

This came from Template:Documentation/preload. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Redrose64 & Gonnym thanks!!!

Failed page move

Talk:African-American civil rights movement (disambiguation) was not moved when article title changed to Talk:Civil rights movement (disambiguation). Mitchumch (talk) 09:14, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Done. {{db-move}} can be used to request moves where the target can only be overwritten by an administrator. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:11, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Fixing an edit in mobile

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T200969

I have a question about the mobile view because some things just seem so strange ... The scenario could hardly be more basic: I check my watchlist, I notice that somebody has made an edit (or left a comment) and I want to fix a mistake in that edit (or respond to the comment). Perhaps I'm missing something but as best as I can tell there's no way to do that without doing a separate search for the page. Current workflow:

Click on the edit. This gets me to the diff view. So far, so good: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/887387231
There's no link to jump in and edit directly. But now it gets tricky. If I click on the title of the page that was edited, this doesn't take me to the page. Instead, it leads me to the current version (?oldid=...). E.g., in my example, to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martyazo&oldid=887387231.
This oldid view has an edit button (i.e., that pen icon), and all of the sections have edit buttons (unlike in desktop view). So I thought I'd give these a try.
However, if you click on any of these icons, you just get to the source view, prompting you to leave the edit interface again.
You're now back to the ?oldid=... view. But there's simply no link anywhere that lets you navigate to a live version of the page where you could edit.

How are you supposed to edit the page without having to manually search for it? Am I missing something? Best, — Pajz (talk) 23:39, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Pajz, I have been able to reproduce the issue and I agree that it is problematic. If you'd like, you can create a task on Phabricator by following the instructions at mw:How to report a bug. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 01:46, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

It's complicated and not logical but after step 1 and 2 you can click "Previous revision" and then "Latest revision". PrimeHunter (talk) 02:15, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer to the Phabricator tasks, and thanks for the helpul work-around, PrimeHunter, I'll do that (if, for whatever reason, I feel a desire to make further edits using the mobile interface ...). — Pajz (talk) 19:53, 15 March 2019 (UTC) (Not sure what the process is on this page but as far as I'm concerned this thread can be archived.)

New template: WikiProject link

Hi all! I have created a new template that you can use to link to WikiProject pages at {{WikiProject link}} (or {{proj}} for short), analogous to {{User link}}. For example, to link to WikiProject Biography, you can type {{proj|Biography}}, which produces WikiProject Biography. Please use this template and leave feedback on the template talk page. Also, feel free to modify or extend the template as long as you keep the basic interface the same. Thanks! Cross-posted to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council. Qzekrom 💬 ^they_them 03:34, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

I have commented at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council#New template that we already have {{wplink}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:38, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Should this edit have happened?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T218473

I'm unsure why this edit was possible. The article should have been fully protected. Is it server synchronisation lag, or a bug? Interference with PC1?

Samsara 11:16, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

You fully protected and your next edit was to change that to pending changes. Doesn't that "overwrite" the full protection? CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 11:49, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

@CambridgeBayWeather: Both forms of protection were configured in one step, I did not enter the menu twice. In my experience up to this point, PC can run concurrently with hard protections, it simply has no effect and kicks in again eventually if its duration is longer than that of the hard protection. This is also the only way to avoid having this other bug (untriaged for a year now!) Samsara 18:43, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

I think this is a bug, Pending Changes should not affect page protection, which allows it to be used to extend protection, or a page with PC to have its protection level increased temporarily. Danski454 (talk) 17:02, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Is it a bug, really? Pending changes should only be configured on an article that is allowing edits by editors below the level of administrator, and if PC is being configured, then it would logically drop the full protection. There is no value to PC if the article is fully protected. Perhaps the bigger question is why anyone would enable PC when fully protecting an article. Risker (talk) 18:51, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Using pending changes and another level of protection (usually semi-protection) allows having some level of protection after the full/semi protection expires, as it basically allows setting multiple protections of different durations. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:54, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

In any case, the full protection was immediately lifted within the same minute after application, and dropped to Extended Confirmed protection; the user who made the edit is at the EC level, and edited several minutes after the EC protection was applied. The article was fully protected for less than a minute, and there is an edit summary when dropping to EC that indicates it was an intentional decision. Nothing here indicates that there's a bug. Risker (talk) 18:58, 9 March 2019 (UTC) Sorry, I misread the protection log and saw 11:40 as 11:04. Mea culpa. Risker (talk) 19:27, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

A page with both FP and PC1 should not be editable (see Wikipedia:Sandbox2 for an example) - but it could be buggy under just the wrong timing or conditions - does not appear to be happening now, and this is hard to replicate. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:03, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Timeline:

110431 - Edit Protection Set to admin
110431 - Pending changes set to autoconfirmed
110809 - The suspect edit took place, appears to violoate the edit protection

@Risker: I'm not seeing the "full protection was immediately lifted within the same minute" - what am I missing? — xaosflux ^Talk 19:03, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Mea culpa, I misread the protection log. The change from full protection to EC protection was at 11:40, not 11:04. Risker (talk) 19:27, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Possibly related: this RFPP thread from back in August. Muboshgu semi-protected Dick's Sporting Goods, but only a log entry was generated, and the page remained unprotected according to &action=info. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 19:11, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
Possibly, seems like the protection wasn't actually applied at all (again). — xaosflux ^Talk 19:31, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

So the answer seems to be, nobody really knows, it just occasionally happens, is not reproducible, and will in all likelihood never get fixed. Samsara 00:04, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Samsara: Well, issues that are not reproducible are not easy to fix. It'll get fixed eventually when it's more fully understood, possibly when investigating other issues, as currently the details are hazy and the issue relatively harmless. I can see this old issue from phab T4737 where something like that was reported but couldn't be reproduced, so had to be closed as invalid. If this is reported (as is), it's similar scenario that would play out. FWIW, when you first posted this message I visited the page and it was quite fully protected and so it was in ?action=info. – Ammarpad (talk) 06:39, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

It just happened again: Googol. Unprotection is in the log, but not taking effect. IP reporting to not be able to edit, action=info also reports it as protected. I'm not going to fix it now so that people can poke at it in its current state if they wish. I'm starting to think that this is a recent bug and probably reproducible. Specifically, I suspect that simultaneous configuration of pending changes and page protection no longer works reliably. When pending changes is changed, any changes to page protection done at the same time seem to generate a log entry and do nothing else.

Reporting this and will add link here shortly. Samsara 10:45, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Fabricator link: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T218473

Samsara 10:49, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Tool

Do we have a tool that helps to easily import pages? (Aside from special:import)--▸ ‎épine _talk♬ 14:04, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Purge cache

How do I purge the cache for the small portal links that appear in the Template:Portal or Template:Portal bar? Mitchumch (talk) 07:26, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. If a page transcludes a template and something changes in the template then the whole page will automatically be rendered again but it can take time before the job queue gets to it. You can purge a specific page with immediate effect but you still have to purge the whole page. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:12, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

PrimeHunter This does not appear to be the case for article pages that used to be linked to File:AmericaAfrica.svg (see here for full list). The image was part of the small portal links for Portal:African American. Article pages with those small links don't seem to purge the old image file. I was using null edits, but I should not have to do that. The article page Jenn Shaw is one example of this problem. Mitchumch (talk) 23:10, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

I examined Jenn Shaw and 20 other pages at your link. They had all been updated to display File:Kleed- Stichting Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen - RV-5899-18 (cropped).jpg. It can take much longer to update link tables than to render the articles. A purge of an article will update the article page but not the link tables associated with the article. The latter requires a null edit to do right away. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:24, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

That "much longer" can be months, sometimes forever. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 23:28, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the information. I'll null edit the remaining articles. Mitchumch (talk) 00:29, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

I see no reason to use server resources on that. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:49, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

piped links in templates?

Could somebody look at the {{distinguish}} hatnote on Draft:Hernan Larrain Matte. It's rendering badly. I suspect it has to do with the piped link in the template arguments, but my template-fu isn't strong enough to fix it myself. -- RoySmith (talk) 22:50, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

@RoySmith:

fixed --DannyS712 (talk) 22:54, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Poorly interacting templates

It seems like a few articles are suddenly (without any changes to the articles themselves) showing a lot of "$NaN" where {{Inflation}} is piped in to {{Formatprice}}. Check out e.g. Macy's, Inc. ("2010 retail sales revenue of $25 billion (equivalent to $NaN in 2019)."). Even one of the examples on the documentation for {{Inflation}} is broken. I don't see any changes to the templates themselves either. I suspect something changed to make {{Inflation}} start outputting scientific notation like "2.032×10⁹" instead of "2.032E+9" and {{Formatprice}} can't handle that, but I don't know what that change could be. —BorgHunter (talk) 13:03, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

The format change in {{Inflation}} happens for numbers above 10⁹. It was caused by [45] where Pppery changed {{Decimals}} from Module:Decimals to {{Rnd}} due to Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 December 14#Template:Rnd. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:59, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Oh, isn't always annoying when you implement a template merge and some unexpected issue crops up. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 19:16, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

File:Lee Dixon.jpg

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T30299

There's something strange happening with this image that might be related to a file name change on Commonswikidata/meta data or something. When you click on this file, you're basically seeing the Commons image c:File:Lee Dixon 2015-02-10 1.jpg which was recently moved from c:File:Lee Dixon.jpg. It appears that the Commons file was moved becoming it was being shadowed by the local non-free file of the same name. However, something strange happened as a result of the move and it's almost if the non-free file has been overwritten by the Commons file. The local non-free file is "File:Lee Dixon.jpg" and should be infobox image used in Lee Dixon (actor) I'm not sure why this is happening, but it needs to be sorted out before the non-free file get mistakenly deleted per WP:F5 or WP:NFCC#1. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:12, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps one better asks this on Commons (links back to here) Klaas `Z4␟` V 22:08, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

This appears to be a bug, I'm opening a phab ticket. In the meantime, I've broken the redirect at commons and it appears to have restored our local behavior. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:24, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

@Marchjuly and KlaasZ4usV: this appears to be phab:T30299, opened about 5 years ago and noone is working on. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:27, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks KlaasZ4usV and Xaosflux for taking a look at this. -- Marchjuly (talk) 00:43, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Any time, Marchjuly, you're more than welcome

Klaas `Z4␟` V 11:05, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Template merger discussion notice

There is a discussion about merging {{Yesno}}, {{If declined}}, and {{If affirmed}}. As this template group affects a very large number of pages, additional input is requested. Please join in the conversation at the TFD. Thank you. Primefac (talk) 19:49, 19 March 2019 (UTC) (please ping on reply)

Template:Sec link/secure url

anyone know what is generating transclusions in Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Sec link/secure url? it would be helpful to clear this from the database report if possible. thank you. Frietjes (talk) 23:43, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Whoa, something really weird was going on there that I don't exactly understand myself. I think I've fixed the problem, though. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 00:20, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Blue Publish Button on Upper Right

I noticed there is a slightly different interface when I go to publish. There's a blue Publish button on the upper right and on clicking it you have the option of comparing against previous version, preview, resume editing, or publishing. Is this a new interface that was rolled out for everyone or am I seeing it because I checked all the Beta options in preferences, including Wikitext mode? Thanks. Lore E. Mariano (talk) 13:16, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

LoreMariano, "I checked all the Beta options in preferences, including Wikitext mode" <-- this —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:51, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you! TheDJ (talk • contribs Lore E. Mariano (talk) 14:40, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Ref toolbar

Since yesterday, the autofill function in the Help:Referencing_for_beginners#Using_refToolbar doesn't work for me at all. You know, the little magnifying glass. Any help? I use Chrome on a laptop. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:30, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Also reported at Wikipedia talk:RefToolbar#Autofill of citations with pings to maintainers. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:54, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:28, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

[APJ-20190117-1] Mankovich, Christopher; et al. (17 January 2019). "Cassini Ring Seismology as a Probe of Saturn's Interior. I. Rigid Rotation". The Astrophysical Journal. 871 (1). Retrieved 18 January 2019.

[NASA-20190118-2] McCartney, Gretchen; Wendel, JoAnna (18 January 2019). "Scientists Finally Know What Time It Is on Saturn". NASA. Retrieved 18 January 2019.

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