Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bug reports and feature requests should be made in Phabricator (see how to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs).

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Empty, but not empty? categories

I have a strange problem involving, of course, categories. The categories state that they aren't empty. If you look at Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion, you can see a few categories that indicate they have one or two pages in them, including Category:2000 establishments in Angola, Category:2022 Polish television seasons, Category:2022 Thai television series endings, Category:2022 Winter Olympics pictograms, Category:2004 Croatian television series endings and Category:2009 Peruvian television series endings are some examples you can see in the Empty Categories category.

And, if you look at these category pages, there is a bright red message "This category does not appear to be empty!". But the categories are, in fact, empty. I thought this might be a problem with a system lag or something (a layman's guess) and I was going to add this message last night when I noticed the problem but decided to wait to see if it went away. But they still appear to be non-empty empty categories. I did a "purge cache" and still, no change. I've been working with empty categories since 2015 and I've never seen this happen before.

Of course, as far as technical problems go, this is more of a curiosity than anything else but I wondered if anyone had an idea why this would suddenly happen now, and to more than one category page. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Liz: that red error is from the db template making use of the PAGESINCAT magic word; it is not reliable as it is subject to database and replication lag, which can't be fixed with a purge (phab:T85696). So either ignore it, or wait. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:33, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

The code is in Template:Db-c1: {{#ifeq:{{PAGESINCAT:{{PAGENAME}}}}|0||{{error|This category does not appear to be empty!}}}}. "does not appear" is a hint that it may not be certain. If it's currently very uncertain then we could state it more clearly or link a page which mentions the issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:28, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, I don't quite understand but I appreciate the explanations. That doesn't have to do with your explanations but my lack of understanding of templates and all things database. It's nice that others can figure out what is going on when weird, unexpected things happen. Many thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:40, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Today we ran a script to recount categories so that counts are well, correct. It's possible said script has a bug or there's some other race condition going on. I re-opened T299823 for now. Legoktm (talk) 08:11, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Okay, Legoktm, another VERY LITTLE BUG which can drive CSD patrolling admins a little nuts. Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as spam always has 1 page too many in the content listing (see right-side listing of categories on the page). If there are 2 pages in this category, it will say there are 3 pages. But mostly, it says there is 1 page when the category is actually empty.

A few weeks ago, the CSD categories were completely out-of-whack but this is a very specific mistake that is only happening in the Spam CSD category but it's been a couple of days now. Admins who patrol CSD categories like to clear them out so to still have a 1 page indicated when the category is empty can be a little irritating. Not, stop the world irritating, but if you have a solution, that would be awesome! Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:08, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

@Liz: There is a long-standing known bug causing counts to be wrong. Basically whenever a page is added or removed to MediaWiki, it just adds +1 or -1 to the count, so if that fails for any reason, there will permanently be one more or less page in the category and it just tends to get worse over time. The first step to making that less worse is T299823, which I mentioned earlier. We now recount all categories from scratch on the first of the month.

The second part is T85696, which once deployed (still in progress) will let you purge the category page to recount it from scratch. Hopefully that'll be available in a few weeks and then in the future if you find a category with counts that are off, purging it will do the trick. Legoktm (talk) 06:29, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

API policy question

I am considering writing a script to analyze data from WP:AIV. The script will need to query about 10,000 diffs using the compare action of Wikipedia's API. The script is purely read-only: I am not making any edits, just downloading the JSON outputs for offline use. I have read MediaWikiWiki:API:Etiquette and don't want to run anything that exceeds a reasonable rate of API requests. My questions are:

• Is running my script allowed by policy?
• Do I need to get BRFA approval to proceed?

I am willing to spread the API requests out over time and limit myself to batches of 500 requests at a time. I appreciate any technical advice from more seasoned editors as this is my first foray into using the API. Best, Altamel (talk) 03:55, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

• Yes
• No (you are not doing any actions that modify en.wp)

—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:23, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Yup, that. Not something that the English Wikipedia will care about - however if you do flood the server developers may shut you down. Your request is really not "that big" in the grand scheme (20x 500 result requests) - just don't do something silly like make 10000 individual requests - each with a new session - and all in parallel :D — xaosflux ^Talk 10:48, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@Altamel: just to be clear, don't make 500 requests at the same time, requests should be made in series, not in parallel. Legoktm (talk) 08:09, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Hope we didn't confuse you with terms - yes you can make 1 "request" that has 500 results; then repeat that process in series, 20 times. If you really have to you could make 10,000 requests, but also do them in series - and if it is public-read only data: skip authentication steps too. Don't make hundreds of parallel requests. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:24, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

The compare API only supports one result at a time. Though I'm not sure @Altamel why you want to query diffs. Sounds like you'd be better off querying the revisions, which can be done in bulk (50 revisions per request, although if you have a bot account you could upto do 500 {but there's a 12 MB size limit on the API response which 500 revisions could break}) and then compute the diffs locally. – SD0001 (talk) 15:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@TheDJ, Xaosflux, and Legoktm: thanks everyone for the replies. Good to know this is a permissible use of the API, though I must admit I am still a little confused about the difference between parallel and series. I have not run any requests en masse yet (still testing small bits of code in the API sandbox). So to clarify – even though I can't pipe requests for the compare API, if I write the code so that it waits until a JSON is returned, and then loops back to making the next request, and repeat that 10,000 times – that's what you mean by making requests in parallel?
SD00001, I did not know that the compare API can only handle one revision at a time – thanks for the clarification. That explains why my tests in the API sandbox, where I tried to use the pipe character to request multiple revisions at once, kept returning errors. I had planned to use diffs because it was easier to match up the content that was added with the account that added it – as you pointed out, otherwise I would have to back out the diffs manually. Altamel (talk) 19:55, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Some programming languages/libraries allow for making multiple HTTP requests at the same time (see Asynchronous I/O), which would be requests in parallel. To make requests in series, just wait for the first request to finish and then make the next one. I would recommend using one of the pre-existing API client libraries, they all should take care of that for you. Legoktm (talk) 06:32, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

@Altamel, why do you want to do that? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:08, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF), I am hoping to analyze statistics regarding the frequency of reports and average response times. If I ever find the time to finish the analysis, I might write my results up as a report and offer suggestions for improving AIV. Best, Altamel (talk) 19:55, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

In that case, would you rather be counting "edits", or would you rather count "comments"? mw:Extension:DiscussionTools has a hidden tag that would let you identify new (signed) comments (e.g., in RecentChanges), and there's a way to identify and count the individual comments on the page, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:22, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@Altamel, take a look at what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)?dtdebug=1#API_policy_question does to this discussion. Would that kind of comment parsing be more useful to you than the diffs? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:30, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@Altamel, you may be interested in User:Enterprisey/AIV analysis. I have a document describing the raw data format and can prepare more data over any timespan you want. Enterprisey (talk!) 00:34, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Coord not displaying correctly

The {{coord}} template is supposed to put the geographical coordinates at the top right of the article when the parameter "display=title" (or its variants "display=inline,title" and "display=it") is used. Instead, when I'm logged in it displays the coordinates at the point the template is used, right-aligned. With the variants, it displays the coordinates in place twice, once directly and again right-aligned. I believe this changed yesterday, although it may be it happened earlier and I didn't notice until then. The template and the module it invokes haven't changed, so I'm not sure where to look. For an example of use, see Oban, New Zealand, just below the map in the infobox.

I'm using Firefox on a desktop with vector non-legacy; I'm aware that display=title doesn't work on mobile. If this is something unique to my preferences, it's not important but I'd be grateful if anyone could suggest a conflict with some gadget I may have enabled (I don't recall changing anything in my preferences or .css and .js files recently, apart from removing a few gadgets today to see if they affect this problem). If this does apply to all logged in users, it's a significant regression as coord is used in over a million articles and I suspect display=title is a common parameter.-gadfium 04:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

This week WMF has made Vector 2022 its own skin and this is probably one of the results. Coord has been a troublesome template generally. It won't impact anyone who isn't logged in at this time and of course only those who use Vector 2022.

I don't know how to fix this one. Izno (talk) 04:47, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I can confirm that changing my skin to Vector legacy (2010) fixes the problem, but I'll stick with Vector (2022) and know this glitch doesn't affect most viewers.-gadfium 05:07, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for reporting this. I'll now revert an edit I just made as a workround to the problem in an infobox coordinate display. Thincat (talk) 12:00, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

This is intended behaviour and preferable to the other situation where the coordinates were overlapping the text. See phab:T281974 for all the gorey details and Template_talk:Coord/Archive_11#Use_page_status_indicator_for_coord?

@Izno earlier in that Phab ticket you wrote "Because there is no way to differentiate between new and old Vector that I know of, there's no way to fix this that makes both new and old variants of the skin happy. Either a) it's time to split new Vector out, b) time to give up on legacy vector for all involved, or c) give me a vector2 somewhere in one of elements toward the top of the DOM."

You now have a way to differentiate between the two.. so can this be solved now, or do we understand the problem differently now?

Feel free to edit MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css if you have a better idea for how to handle this.

In eu:MediaWiki:Vector-2022.js, an imperfect solution exists, where JavaScript is being used to inject it into the table of contents so perhaps that could be used here as an interim solution. Jdlrobson (talk) 21:35, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson (WMF), "intended behavior"? Yikes. This is causing infoboxes to exceed their intended width, and the duplication is absolutely not something that can remain. I've never seen any explanation of why language switching is such an essential feature that it needs to commandeer that top right corner, but if you're also going to then just shove everything that used to be there into the article and tell the community to clean it up, that's a problem. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:23, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I can't judge whether it's worse to have:

• overlapping text which make both text unreadable/unclickable
• the coordinates inline - a larger infobox
• the coordinates hidden.

However the first option was clearly bad, judging by the many bug reports I've had to handle over the last 6 months since the problem was originally identified (in May 2021). In my better judgement I thought the second was a better. As I said before, feel free to revert the change in MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css or provide a different solution. It was a good faith suggested improvement on something that has been a problem for over a half a year that I'm constantly seeing bug reports on from users complaining.

I'm trying to be helpful here. I've spent the entire week addressing problems with gadgets in my own free time so I am hurt by the accusation here that I'm unnecessarily dumping work on the community, particularly for a skin which is opt-in exactly because of these kinds of bugs, that together we need to fix. Jdlrobson (talk) 23:53, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Jon (WMF), it's telling that putting the language switcher somewhere else isn't even listed in your options. It appears that decision was made long ago, with as far as I know zero community input. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 00:35, 5 February 2022 (UTC)^{Edited 05:11, 8 February 2022 (UTC) per below.}

{{Coord}} appears below, not beside, the top heading so I don't see how moving the language dropdown could help. That said, canceling position: absolute; is a weird choice. top: -3em; works perfectly for me. Also, Vector 2022 can show topicons like {{Administrator topicon}} just fine, so wrapping {{Coord}} with <indicator>...</indicator> is another option. Nardog (talk) 00:53, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Nardog, I will take an edit request for the Vector 2022 sheet if you post one. Izno (talk) 03:21, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

@Sdkb, I understand that more than half people who speak English do so as a second language, and almost half the traffic to the English Wikipedia is from countries where English isn't the primary language. It's possible that while the language switcher is not especially relevant to monoglots like us that it's still useful to many millions of people. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

As a tri-glot from a country where English isn't the primary language, I don't find the language switcher useful because articles on English Wikipedia are almost always better than in most other languages. – SD0001 (talk) 05:27, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@SD0001, we have a pretty good idea of when someone might want to switch to read an article in a different language: if it is featured/good status there but not here, is substantially longer there, has substantially more citations there, or is for a topic whose coordinate location (P625) is in a country where that is the primary language. The WMF folks might want to consider making the switcher more prominent only in those circumstances. Someone reading about Chicago's Harris Theater in Arabic should absolutely be given a prominent link to the English article, but readers of the English article definitely don't need to know about the Arabic page. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:44, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

A smarter approach to language switching would also allow readers some degree of personalization. If I indicate in my settings that I know English and Hindi, then it's worthwhile to suggest the Hindi page prominently if the algorithm thinks it might be even slightly better than the English page, and Hindi should always be listed first when the menu is opened. Features like this would encourage more readers to create an account, which then helps us if they decide to start editing. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:50, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

mw:Universal Language Selector/Compact Language Links is supposed to do this, but I've turned it off as it's really useless. I can't manually select which language I want to be at the top and it thinks I'm fluent in languages I'm not just because I clicked on them just once. Nardog (talk) 05:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Specifically, see the FAQ on how to select which languages are shown. @Nardog and @SD0001, I believe that if you add your favorite languages to your web browser, then CLL will keep those at the top. That's how it seems to work for me.

I have Compact Language Links on at most wikis and off at a few. I think it's a good default for people who read fewer than ~five languages and who aren't systematically going from wiki to wiki (e.g., not for an editor who wants to update the picture on every article about their favorite boy band, or, in my case, someone who occasionally needs to find all the village pumps in every language for a project). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

[I]f you add your favorite languages to your web browser, then CLL will keep those at the top. Therein lies the problem. I might want to keep larger wikis at the top but I'm not going to tell every website I visit I'm a super polyglot. Nardog (talk) 22:19, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Couldn't disagree more. Simply which (and how many) language editions have corresponding articles can tell you a lot about the subject itself even if you have no interest in reading any of them. I'd be really bummed if they forced the new Vector on us for this reason. Nardog (talk) 05:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

That sort of meta information might be intriguing as a curiosity, but for the purposes of informing readers, I don't think we should be holding it up, as it's a poor proxy for a subject's importance and it fails WP:DUE as it's not anything external sources ever talk about. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:46, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Sdkb, are you saying that the language switcher isn't talked about in external sources, or that nobody ever writes about Wikipedia having many language editions? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm saying that if you go to a random topic, say Moon, no external source telling you about the Moon ever mentions that the Moon has an article in 254 language editions of Wikipedia. We'd never consider writing that in the lead, any more than we'd consider noting in the article that it got 262,285 pageviews over the past month. Because it's not covered in external sources, it's not due, so it's not something we should emphasize for encyclopedic reasons to teach people about a subject as Nardog seems to suggest above. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:16, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't know if sources talking about the Moon mention it, but this journal article about Zika fever specifies that the related Wikipedia articles were available in 96 languages.

DUE applies to "All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia". The user interface is not "encyclopedic content". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:22, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Hey @Sdkb, just wanted to chime in with some details on the research and feedback we did on language switching during the development of the new button.  We were able to get feedback from multilingual readers in India (results available here), as well as about 200 logged-in editors and community members across 10 languages (feedback summary available here).  This feedback round showed that most people preferred the new location of the language switching functionality.  Upon deployment, we did see some data and received feedback showing it was more difficult for some people previously familiar with the feature to find the new version.  We are currently working on iteration to make sure languages are sufficiently visible for the folks who need them.  More information can be found in this blog post and the feature page within the documentation. Hope this is helpful! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@OVasileva (WMF), thanks for sharing those links; they were good reads. It looks like there was some feedback sought, so I'm crossing out my comment on that above. It doesn't entirely alleviate my concerns, though, since in both cases the question was framed as "does this make it easier to switch languages?", and as Izno noted below, yeah, if you make something super prominent, of course it'll make it easier to find, but it also has costs, as some editors like MusikAnimal pointed out. Was there ever any sort of intermediate prototype tested, like keeping it in the left sidebar but just moving it higher up? (Moving the "tools" section links somewhere else, like under the "more" menu similar to Twinkle, would also help with the issues the India focus group had from needing to scroll, even though some editors might have concerns.)

One other thing I noticed in the India focus group is some concerning trends related to how readers decide whether to trust Wikipedia. Per pp. 147–148, only 6 out of the 24 mentioned references. Further, it appears that zero out of 24 mentioned the single biggest indicator of an article's trustworthiness, which is whether it has a recent GA or FA review. This is something I've long suspected, given that our icons aren't placed prominently and aren't designed well, but it's absolutely relevant that moving the language switcher into the top right corner pushes the GA/FA icons down a row, further degrading their prominence. This is a major problem if we want to facilitate good information literacy among readers. I mentioned this to you at Wikimania, but I've seen no indication anyone on the Desktop Improvements team is working on it. Granted, some of the work needs to be done on the community side, but there are very concrete ways the WMF could help. The topicon move discussion deadlocked largely because many editors held the (imo implausible) view that readers do know about GA/FA; asking the next focus group about it would give us research to answer that question. And assuming they don't, the WMF design/graphics folks could provide icon ideas or prototype designs for the community to consider that'd help readers notice GAs/FAs better. What can be done to get those things on the agenda? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:10, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Previous research has shown that readers click on a ref tag (i.e., click on any single blue clicky number) approximately three times per 1,000 page views (and then primarily on stub articles, which suggests that they are seeking more information than the article contains). In that context, having 25% of the readers mention the references is much higher than I would have expected. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:08, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for spending the time to write everything out here! Here’s some thoughts from our side:

Language Switching: I think something that is worth pointing out was that the goal of moving the language button itself was to make it easier to switch languages, thus, that is what we were testing for :) To give a bit more detail on why this is important - what we learned from the research in India was that a lot of folks that were using the wikis in multiple languages did not know they could actually switch languages directly from the page.  They would instead go to a search engine and type the name of the article followed by their suggested language and then the wiki (for example:  “moon hindi wikipedia”) and then hope to get the correct result.  From our perspective this was due to two different factors - the first was the location of languages on the page - at the very bottom, often times requiring scrolling, the second was their positioning within the sidebar itself.  

As you mentioned, the sidebar contains a lot of links that both refer to properties of the article, most of which currently under the “tools” heading: (ex: languages, related changes, interwiki links) as well as links that refer to properties or navigation to the site as a whole (ex: recent changes, community portal, etc).  Even though these are in separate sections, it’s difficult to tell which will act on the article vs which will act on the whole site.  As a part of the project, we are beginning to work on ways to separate these so that it is easier to understand which link does what.  Moving languages to the top of the page served this function too - it is now visually clearer that selecting a language will show you that article in a different language rather than send you to the main page of the wiki in that language.  In terms of further explorations around this separation, this is our most recent prototype of what it might look like to separate these menus completely.  As a note - this is a very early prototype that we haven’t yet tested with readers or communities so nothing certain, yet we would love feedback on it if you have any initial thoughts.  We're still doing more tweaks on this (for example, making the menus pinned by default) and will start sharing it more widely in the next few weeks.

On trust: In terms of your second question - thank you for raising this again.  As I mentioned then, this is still something that we want to do, although it is outside of the initial scope of the project.  The way we see it is, Desktop Improvements will focus on cleaning up the navigation and creating the space for exposing different tools and indicators for article quality.  Here, I’d also like to question whether the GA/FA tags are the best way to do this (they might be, it’s just something we should test first).  When we take this on, we would probably want to start with a study of different types of quality indicators to identify which ones are perceived as increasing the levels of trust in the article.  Another thing we would like to explore is how we can use the language/copy of the links and items themselves to better indicate its meaning, with the hypothesis that reducing confusion here will also influence people’s overall sense of trust and welcomeness.  Pinging @AHollender (WMF) here as well, as he might have some further thoughts on this.

Hope this is helpful! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 10:57, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@OVasileva (WMF), thanks for sharing the prototype! There are a bunch of changes I'd make to the menu items, many of which come from WP:SIDEBAR20 (e.g. put the print/share/link section first above tools); that RfC is an important one to review to get a sense of how the community thinks about the sidebar items. The pinned ToC is fine with me, but removing the copy from the end of the lead is likely to get pushback because it'll cause infoboxes to extend into the body and create sandwiches. The menu pinning is a neat feature—something I'd also like to see explored (for both this and the user menu) is to have the dropdown appear on cursor hover rather than requiring a click—I think that'd make the collapsing pill go down a lot easier.

On trust, we should be careful to distinguish between indicators that make readers trust a page more and those that reflect an actual difference in quality, and ideally push those things into alignment. An FA icon is huge for the latter but I'd guess not for the former. That's something we could try to remedy through better design. The India survey seemed to focus mostly on "How do we get users to trust us more?", and while that might be the typical goal in the corporate world, our situation is more complex: we certainly do want readers, but we don't want them to trust us so much they take legal/medical advice from unsourced content. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)^{Edited 19:58, 11 February 2022 (UTC)}

Jdlrobson I'm really sympathetic to Sdkb here right now given that I know that the test that was performed that "supported" this change was fundamentally shit. Yes, of course more people are going to see it if it takes up more space at the top of the page. That was the wrong null hypothesis to begin with.

That said, here's some further recommendations on the technical side of what can be done now since it will apparently take heaven and earth to get WMF to back that change out, and I am not strong enough to move that much. Either:

1. ensure that MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css is always concatenated after MediaWiki:Vector.css, or
2. remove the Vector 2022 dependency on MediaWiki:Vector.css.

I have a strong preference for the latter just from a cleanliness and 'trainability' perspective.

Right now my console is telling me that -2022.css is getting concatenated into the file before Vector.css, likely defeating the purpose of having the dependency on Vector.css in the first place. Review Brooklyn, where the .vector-2022 #coordinates CSS has insufficient specificity to override the CSS in Vector.css (notably, the .mw-indicator #coordinates block), because it's appearing before and not after the other.

(Please also consider renaming the skin too. I hate writing the numbers after. Some pun off Vector would be cool, I've seen Matrix tossed around. Or possibly Space, from vector space, because of all the whitespace [everyone will have a wry laugh at that one].) Izno (talk) 05:05, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

And following this up, it looks like having the interlanguage links there/not there affects what the offset should be when we make the system an indicator and keep using position absolute. 3.5em when it displays and 0 when it doesn't. So, nothing I can do to fix that at all without just making it an indicator and tossing our absolute positioning. I can maybe undeploy the change I made to Module:Coordinates and then try to position stuff from there, but I doubt that will work the way I want seeing as no one has moved on that. Izno (talk) 06:26, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Maybe this is fixed now, IDK, I've reverted the Module:Coordinates change and adjusted MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css. It works for collapsed interwiki list which is standard? in Vector 2022. Still seeing that Vector-2022.css is concatenating into the file before Vector.css. Izno (talk) 21:30, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Enable live updates by default

Is there a way to enable the live updates for one's watchlist by default, rather than having to manually turn it on each time? I asked at the Teahouse and was told that another user's always stayed active when he turned it on, but that doesn't appear to be the case for me -- mine always turns off any time I refresh the page. — Czello 16:46, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Don't think that's natively supported. There's User:SD0001/watchlist-update-title though that does this as well as updates the count of unread changes in the browser tab title. – SD0001 (talk) 03:23, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Related changes to talk pages

If $1 links to $2 and if I then go to $1 and click on "related changes", I get a list of changes to $2. But if I have $1 on my watchlist, I also can view changes to Talk:$2. Will it be difficult to implement a corresponding feature in related changes? It would be useful to monitor talk pages easily without having to link to them specifically or manually add the links to my watchlist. Utfor (talk) 08:43, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Template:Year in various calendars

Hello all, I don't really want to go messing with a highly used template that uses a module, so I was wondering if it was a simple job to create a version of this template that is in a default collapsed state. It's taking up a lot of real estate on year pages and I am guessing that 99.9% of the readers of those pages don't even look at it. TIA, Black Kite (talk) 14:39, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Something like:
{{cot | Year in various calendars | right=true | b-color=transparent | border2=transparent | bg2=transparent | bg=transparent}} {{Year in various calendars}} {{cob}} ― Qwerfjkltalk 16:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

The template's documentation says (in bold italic, no less): "Please do not rename or remove these classes nor collapse nested elements which use them."

I do not know why that should be so but before you go off and collapse all of those infoboxen (which I don't find to be all that obtrusive) you should discover why the template documentation is so averse to collapse.

The text in the template's documentation is added by {{Microformat message}}. Alas, that template's author, Sardanaphalus, is, apparently, no longer with us. Perhaps someone else knows the reason.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:22, 6 February 2022 (UTC) 16:32, 6 February 2022 (UTC) (spelling + more)

Thanks both. I'll have a mess about with it in userspace and see if it breaks anything. Black Kite (talk) 19:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Special:Allpages and redirects

Would it be possible to give Special:allpages the ability to filter out redirects? We have a redirect discussion where someone wants to delete redirects because of the inability to filter them out, and we shouldn't be deleting redirects merely because of a shortcoming with our tools. Thanks. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 21:04, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

The thing about special pages is that they are for every wiki, including the sister projects and all of the wikis listed on wikiapiary (it lists wikis that use Mediawiki). Creating an Wikipedia:Database reports for this purpose on the other hand is entirely possible.--Snævar (talk) 21:15, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Plus all redirects on Special:Allpages are in italics.--Snævar (talk) 21:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Special:PrefixIndex supports hiding redirects for what it's worth, so it is indeed a bit of a weird asymmetry. Nardog (talk) 21:33, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

As does mw:API:Allpages! Nardog (talk) 21:35, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

It used to. However it seems it was disabled in March 2017 to resolve an issue where someone mass screen-scraping special:allpages caused outages (phab:T160916). A request to re-enable it in August 2017 was declined (phab:T173479). The task to actually fix the issue (phab:T160983) has been open since March 2017, but no actual action appears to have taken place since then (it wasn't even prioritised until September 2021, when it was rated low priority). So it seems like a database report or similar is going to be the only useful way forward for the next several years (deleting redirects is not a useful way forward). Thryduulf (talk) 01:35, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Can a wikilink work if the word is in a lang template?

Over on the page Mary Robinson#Resignation as president, I have tried to put wikilinks on the words "Cathaoirleach" and "Ceann Comhairle". These words are in Irish, so I have also put them in a {{lang}} template. It's formatted like this: [[Ceann Comhairle|{{Lang|ga|Ceann Comhairle}}]]. Weirdly enough, in the visual editor it appears an a blue-link in italics. But in the reader view, it just shows the square brackets etc.. Any advice about where I've gone wrong? Thanks. Xx78900 (talk) 22:26, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xx78900: See Template:Lang#Syntax and usage, last paragraph, and use [[Ceann Comhairle|{{Lang|ga|Ceann Comhairle|nocat=true}}]]. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:53, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Xx78900 (talk) 22:55, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Please can someone copy over Template:Graph:Map from English Wikipedia to Meta?

Hi

I'm working on some documentation on Meta and have built a map using Template:Graph:Map not realising it wasn't available on meta. Please could someone who knows how to copy templates copy it over for me? I would ask there but I doubt my message would get seen.

Thanks very much

John Cummings (talk) 19:18, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

m:Template:Graph:Map already existed, but was missing some required dependencies. I've now created them, so it should work now. I always hate how much other wikis are a graveyard of broken templates ... * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 22:43, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Pppery thanks so much, works like a charm https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:John_Cummings/map. John Cummings (talk) 01:09, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Pppery maybe they should have a soundtrack to accompany them... Mathglot (talk) 02:52, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-06

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

Recent changes

• English Wikipedia recently set up a gadget for dark mode. You can enable it there, or request help from an interface administrator to set it up on your wiki (instructions and screenshot).
• Category counts are sometimes wrong. They will now be completely recounted at the beginning of every month. [1]

Problems

• A code-change last week to fix a bug with Live Preview may have caused problems with some local gadgets and user-scripts. Any code with skin-specific behaviour for vector should be updated to also check for vector-2022. A code-snippet, global search, and example are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 February. It will be on all wikis from 10 February (calendar).

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

21:14, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Modify header for vect0r-2022.js and css

In a standard JS there is skin specific infornation header (e.g. User:Nux/vector.js) -- "The accompanying .css page for this skin is at...". In the latest skin there seem to be a generic info (e.g. User:Nux/vector-2022.js). Nux (talk) 23:13, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

I have updated Template:Script doc auto/core2.[2] PrimeHunter (talk) 04:14, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Commons - translation

Hello! Can someone experienced in the translation feature in Commons help me with adding translation and language tags to some project pages? The pages and the details can be found here. I asked in the Translators' noticeboard there but I didn't get an answer and thought that maybe I can have some more luck here. Any kind of help would be appreciated as I've never had a chance to work with that feature before. - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:35, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

imdbtitle external wikilink?

• [[imdbtitle:4699982|Rebellion]] = Rebellion
• {{IMDb title | id= 4699982 | title= Rebellion}} = Rebellion at IMDb

0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 04:46, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you have a question? See meta:Help:Interwiki_linking and meta:Special:Interwiki for information. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:52, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

If your non-question is about the preferred form in articles then it's generally templates. It's easier to answer a question if you actually ask one. PrimeHunter (talk) 06:54, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Search button is broken

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T301257

The search button in the top right on mobile view is broken when using the browser without javascript. I think it used to go to Special:Search, now it's just dead. 46.188.165.16 (talk) 07:22, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

See mw:How to report a bug. --Malyacko (talk) 10:43, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

This commit must be the culprit. The #searchIcon button used to be inside the form element, but now it's outside. Ping BWang (WMF). Nardog (talk) 11:00, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the report Jdlrobson (talk) 16:08, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

How do we turn off banner ads?

This is getting really really annoying. I have all banner ads turned off in my prefs, but still have ads on nearly every page, often multiple ads on a page so I have to scroll down to get to the article. It's nearly all garbage, and 'dismissing' them doesn't seem to do any good -- they just pop back up over and over. Hundreds of ads a day; some of the ads I've seen thousands of times. (Like the 'Vote in the Community Wishlist Survey' popup, which is even in extra-large type so that it takes up lots of room.) Once is enough. How do we turn them off or opt out? And is there a universal opt out? Thanks. — kwami (talk) 10:06, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: you can opt out of the central-notice banners here: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-centralnotice-banners; and you can disable geo-notices by turning them off here: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:36, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Also you shouldn't be getting them thousands of times, but if you have disabled cookies or local storage - you will likely see them much more than you should. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:37, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! I'd already unticked everything at the first link, but didn't know about Central Notices at the 2nd. That should help. — kwami (talk) 11:41, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Popup buttons dont work

On my notifications screen, if I press the person icon, a popup appears. I am unable to press the buttons on it. If I do, the popup hides without changing the site. A temporary fix would be, on mobile devices at least, to add the sandbox buttons ect to the sidebar. I assume this popup works with other users, but I use an Amazon Kindle, and isn't possible currently to use my computer for web stuff. Any help or fix would be greatly appreciated. L10nM4st3r _(talk) 11:34, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Could this be the same bug described here?: phab:T298746 Jdlrobson (talk) 16:10, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

All the buttons are visible, they just don't work. -- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 23:03, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I use a Gen 10 Amazon Kindle's default web browser, last system update on October 2021.

On the notification screeen, if I press the person icon a popup with buttons show. I cannot press them. If I try, the popup instead hides.

I cannot easily find anything else that can help. If you need more info, please ping me.

Thanks, -- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 15:25, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

(1) Does the address bar say en.m.wikipedia.org or just en.wikipedia.org? (2) If you follow this link, which skin is selected? Nardog (talk) 15:34, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

On further inspection, the button shows only in advanced mode, right? When I turned it off, the button disipears and I can access my userpage on any page... I used the Vector Legacy 2010 and im on "en.wikipedia .org". No ".m." included. — Preceding unsigned comment added by L10nM4st3r (talk • contribs) 15:55, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I forget to sign...-- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 15:57, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

By "advanced mode" you mean on the toggle on this page? That suggests you're indeed using the mobile site and Minerva, even though your report of the domain and preferences suggests otherwise. So, to recap: when you tap or , a menu shows up but tapping inside the menu does nothing, while you can use the menu that shows up when tapping just fine. Is that correct? Nardog (talk) 16:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Sorry I took a while to respond, Im in my gaming time now. Yes, you are correct. — Preceding unsigned comment added by L10nM4st3r (talk • contribs) 17:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Sry, forgot again :( -- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 17:58, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I made a mistake, yes it is en.m.wikipedia! Sry-- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 19:31, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Not as inportant at the moment, but too similar to class as a different bug type: "new discussion" and article "edit whole" buttons don't work either, but I have managed to work around it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by L10nM4st3r (talk • contribs) 23:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Eliminating internal borders in this table

Dear experts,

In this draft of a table in my Sandbox, borders appear around each cell. How can I eliminate them, please? I've checked out Help:Table with nosuccess. If there are other faults in my coding, I'd greatly appreciate being corrected. Cheers, SCHolar44 (talk) 07:59, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Consider Help:Gallery tag instead. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:50, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, PrimeHunter. I'm fairly familiar with that page, but I want to make the gallery collapsed. Hence resorting to table format. SCHolar44 (talk) 11:49, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

I made a change to your sandbox which removed the borders but unfortunately there are other problems with your table which I don't have time to evaluate or fix at the moment. I'll check back on things when I get home from work. Best regards.--John Cline (talk) 09:18, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks, John. Only 4 letters! I'm looking forward to benefiting from your other corrections. Cheers, Simon. SCHolar44 (talk) 11:49, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

See MOS:COLLAPSE. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:31, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Rapid grant for the creation of a CCI workflow tool

Hello, everyone! You may know me as the creator of CopiedTemplateEditor and InfringementAssistant. Contributor copyright investigations has been backlogged for over 10 years now with over 192 currently active cases and I thought it would be a good idea to develop a userscript/gadget that better handles the processing of CCI cases. I've requested a rapid grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to help in this endevaour. You can find more information about the scope of the userscript/gadget and the grant on m:Grants:Project/Rapid/Chlod/Contributor copyright investigation tool. Feel free to leave comments, questions, suggestions, ideas, and endorsements on the grant talk page. Thanks! Chlod (say hi!) 02:21, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Edit Saved notice

After saving, there is the "Your edit was saved" box near the top of the page that persists for what seems like 2-3 seconds. I often want to edit the short description next, and this box is blocking access to the short description helper. I know I can move the cursor over there and click on dismiss, but is there a way for me to change the timer to something like a half second so it will disappear faster. MB 04:58, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't know about shortening the time but you can get rid of it altogether by adding .postedit { display: none;} to your common.css Nthep (talk) 10:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Nthep, Thanks for that, I tried it and the box is indeed gone. Much better. MB 05:50, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

It's not up for enough time for me to use my browser's "inspect" feature (in order to examine the javascript and stylesheets), yet is up for enough time to annoy MB. Ironic? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:02, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Redrose64: something you can try, in Chrome at least: Open the dev tools, and go to the "sources" tab. Then load your page, press F8 at any point to pause script execution. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:31, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Followup comments on Special:Permalink/1070359740#Twinkle Citation Helper

I had opened a section as can be seen. But now, the reuse tab of citation has appeared again. What had happened last time, and what has happened now. Itcouldbepossible^Talk 08:41, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Are you sure you are seeing File:2017 wikitext editor.png and not File:Accessing the cross-wiki upload tool from wikitext editor, step 1.png ? It is not a big deal if it is the latter.--Snævar (talk) 10:17, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

It looks like you need to select text that contains a reference in order to use the "Re-use" tab. I'm still not sure how it's supposed to work though, as it adds <references><ref name="..." /></references> in the middle of the prose, which results in "Cite error: A list-defined reference with the name '...' has been invoked, but is not defined in the <references> tag (see the help page)." Nardog (talk) 10:30, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Nardog@Snævar I am really sorry for creating such a confusion. Last time and this time too, I made the same mistake. I can see the reuse tab only when I am visual editor mode, and not in source mode. I have got things right. Thanks for your overall help. Itcouldbepossible^Talk 10:43, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

To be fair, we did only have one editor until VisualEditor was deployed. (External editors and CodeEditor do not count.) Snævar (talk) 16:47, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

We actually have a list of editor screenshots to help identify the many various editors. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:00, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

At the time the visual editor was deployed in 2013, there were these options here:

• 2003 wikitext editor
• 2006 wikitext editor (since removed; exists only as a user script/gadget now)
• 2010 wikitext editor (that's the one you're using, @Snævar)
• mobile wikitext editor (the old version, not the current one)
• Wikipedia:WikEd (gadget)

The current list is at mw:Editor. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:33, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@TheDJ@Whatamidoing (WMF)@Snævar Thanks for all your help. Itcouldbepossible^Talk 02:29, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Talk:George Orwell edit requests

Hello! On Talk:George Orwell, the answered edit requests appear to be leaking into other sections not related to the edit request that is answered. I'm thinking it's the images that are causing this but I don't know how to fix it. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 18:50, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

This is normal behavior for things floating right that clear right. You can fix it by removing images or removing bad edit requests or both. Do not remove good edit requests much less their corresponding boxes. Izno (talk) 19:01, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Fixed like this. DuncanHill (talk) 19:02, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:04, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Upstream connect error...

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T301505

Just had the following message when trying to go to my watchlist "upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: overflow". DuncanHill (talk) 19:31, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:ITSTHURSDAY.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 19:34, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

So did MediaWiki just update or what exactly happened? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:36, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Welp, that proves I'm not the only one with this issue. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:34, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia having issues?

Hello again! Just recently (within the hour), when I've tried accessing pages i get the message upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: overflow. Is Wikipedia having issues right now or is it just me? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:34, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

This is being tracked at phab:T301505, and the error message is a side effect of phab:287993. —GMX^{(on the go!)} 19:47, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you mean phab:T287993? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:53, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Nope. It was phab:T287983. Also not a "side effect", the "origin" I guess. —GMX^{(on the go!)} 19:58, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Timestamps off in history? Special:History/Just_6.5

Special:History/Just_6.5 is showing a recent edit that based on the history and current article looks like it should have occurred in between the previous two edits.Slywriter (talk) 21:00, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

It looks OK. The three latest edits (earliest first) are: unlink Ramin Mashare in #Cast; unlink Ramin Mashare in infobox; redlink Ramin Mashare in infobox (revert previous edit). Certes (talk) 21:48, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Certes Maybe I'm having a cache issue but the article does not have the live redlink on my screen and the double revert seems off as there shouldn't have been anything to unlink the second time.Slywriter (talk) 21:54, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter: I see a redlink in the infobox but black text in section Cast. The "double revert" was removal of two separate links to the same title. Certes (talk) 21:57, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. Totally missed they were different areas. Got worried because its Thursday Slywriter (talk) 21:59, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

The style of Special:Contributions on mobile version has been changed

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T293268

I’m a mobile user and prior today when checking my contributions it shows it in the manner I’m familiar with, but today I checked my contribs but it displayed it as though it were in “advanced mode” I checked to see if I accidentally toggled “on” “advanced mode” but I didn’t. Please is there any help as to remedy this? Celestina007 (talk) 21:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

I just cried for a bit, then figured tough luck. Hope you get a work-around. I loved the minimalistic mobile and just switch to desktop as needed.Slywriter (talk) 21:13, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter, yes, but I’m pretty sure there’s a way to remedy this, @PrimeHunter, could you please chime in here? Could anyone please be so kind as to tell mobile users how to remedy this? Celestina007 (talk) 21:16, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

There should be a switch to turn it off here. I'm an idiot. Found the Phabricator task but couldn't connect the dots in my head. —GMX^(ping!) 22:41, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Celestina007, toggling on then off restored for me. Mistook my watchlist for user contribution. :( Slywriter (talk) 22:45, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

It would be extremely helpful if you reported how you feel on phab:T293268 as the simplistic view was removed as the most vocal users are the people who disliked it. I was also disappointed to lose the original styles. I'm working towards making it possible to restore the old view with user styles or possibly make some of the good parts appear in the more powerful advanced view. I'll report back when I have something viable. Jdlrobson (talk) 02:56, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm also having a problem with this. I like the simple one, I dont like the current, it loads too long. Please fix this. We have already a AMC with its own style of user contribution, it's enough, but please don't make the standard mobile style complicated. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 04:10, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

To get the classic Minerva look back. Add

mw.loader.load('/w/index.php?title=User:Jdlrobson/mobilecontribs.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

to Special:MyPage/minerva.js. For a more permenant fix, please record your feedback on phab:T293268. Jdlrobson (talk) 05:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

We need interface administrator to fix this. I don't usually add scripts like that, i don't like it, just return the oldest one it's easy, so scripts not needed. Why they changed it without other users opinion, I am heavily mobile user, they should notify other mobile user like me if they gonna change something on the style, the heck. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 06:03, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

IP range talk pages

With too many tabs open in my browser, I tripped over my myself and inadvertently left a welcome message for a Talk page range (here), instead of the intended IP recipient. This was later cleared up, but not before a different IP saw the message and spammed my UTP, which RegentsPark kindly cleaned up for me. But that left us each scratching our heads: who knew you could create a Talk page for a range and leave a message on it, and how does that even make any sense? Maybe the mw software should prevent that? Or if there's some use case for it, can we get a edit notice added to trap this case in Preview mode with a great, big, red warning, "Are you sure you really want to leave this message for an IP range? Usually this is reserved for WP:SOMETHINGELSE." Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:40, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

I wonder if preventing IP range talk pages from being created would mean preventing subpages of IP talk pages, because I bet that's what the software recognized it as (even if an IP can't end in a zero) and therefore you could create it. Nardog (talk) 00:04, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

The only way we could know for sure if IP range talk pages are considered subpages would be to create one and see if it has a link at the top taking you to the main IP talk page. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:07, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

The example was User talk:94.252.0.0/17. It's considered a subpage of User talk:94.252.0.0: {{SUBPAGENAME:User talk:94.252.0.0/17}} produces 17. For comparison, subpages are disabled in mainspace so {{SUBPAGENAME:94.252.0.0/17}} produces 94.252.0.0/17. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:35, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Ah ok. SO the solution might be to prevent subpages of IP addressed from being created since there's usually no need for an IP to have a subpage since there's the chance it can change. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:43, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

These are fundamentally just wiki pages with no other special meaning (and certainly not the meaning associated with a normal user talk page, IP or otherwise). Changes to these pages do not reach or notify anyone. Izno (talk) 01:12, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

That's interesting. Does that mean that all the IPs in 94.252.0.0/17 got an orange bar of doom, or was the anon just stalking your contributions? Is it possible that we have finally stumbled upon a way to communicate with a whole IPv6/64? (added) Sadly, it looks as if Izno answered these questions while I was typing them. Certes (talk) 01:17, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@Izno: If they don't reach anyone else, was it just by chance that my UTP got spammed (here, @22:11) by a different IP (94.252.85.48) than the one I intended to welcome (94.252.4.105) and subsequently did end up welcoming (here), and which just happens to be within IP range of the spammer? Seems too coincidental. Mathglot (talk) 01:46, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Coincidental in the sense that you tried to reach the editor, probably dropped a warning somewhere, and then the same user came to have a chat with you from a different IP because we have some fairly intelligent abusive editors out there. Izno (talk) 04:14, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

In any case, I'd still like an edit notice (or do I mean, 'edit filter'?), because I'll trip myself up again someday when I'm not being careful enough, and that would help. Mathglot (talk) 01:48, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

You're far from the first person to do this. Here are 650 other examples. (I ignore IPv6 pages beginning with A-F, as I've never seen one.) Certes (talk) 14:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

• I suppose in some cases they could be useful; but software changes may be needed to support them. Likely planned changes in ip masking will mostly moot this idea though. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:00, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Help

I have posted twice on [this talk page] and e-mailed <wikipedialibrary@wikimedia.org> twice, but gotten no response about this.

I signed up for Wikipedia library abount a month ago and have yet to get my login credentials for Newspaper Archive. What's the holdup? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 03:54, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

• @TenPoundHammer: seems to be a duplicate of Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_195#Wikipedia_library_question. TWL is not managed or maintained by the English Wikipedia. You can try the form on this page: <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/contact/> and also the mailing list linked from that page. If still no answer, you could try meta:User talk:Samwalton9 (WMF) who is listed as "Product Manager, The Wikipedia Library". — xaosflux ^Talk 15:07, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Article displaying incorrectly in mobile view or visual editor

Hi, I tried asking at the Teahouse and they recommended asking here. The article for pimecrolimus displays fine normally, but if you open it in mobile view or edit it with the visual editor, you see all of the markup for the infobox at the beginning of the article (like this). This is the case in different browsers and in the Android Wikipedia app. I'm thinking there's something in the infobox content that's breaking it, but I compared with some other drug articles and couldn't figure out quite what the problem is. Any ideas? Thanks. flod logic (talk) 13:42, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

This fixed it as far as I can tell (I couldn't reproduce the problem on mobile, only in VE). It must be the single braces in the split lines that tripped them up. Nardog (talk) 13:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

That did it. Thanks! flod logic (talk) 15:56, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Breaking priority templates

Hi everyone, I came across a certain table, which renders results something like this:

	Wanted	Actual
Wide screen	Lorem Ipsumqwerty of New York is a good man	Lorem Ipsumqwerty of New York is a good man
Middle width	Lorem Ipsumqwerty of New York is a good man	Lorem Ipsumqwerty of New York is a good man
Low width	Lorem Ipsumqwerty of New York is a good man	Lorem Ipsumqwerty of New York is a good man

Here, the wanted and actual rendering is same in wide and low width screens, but in middle width screens they're not the same. I can use &nbsp; to prevent line break after every word, except between "York" & "is" but that will prevent additional line break between "Ipsumqwerty" & "of" even in low width screens.

Now, are there any "Breaking priority" (using brpr henceforth) templates on Wikipedia? Say for example, we use {{brpr|1}} between "York" & "is", and {{brpr|2}} between "Ipsumqwerty" & "of"? The one with higher breaking priority breaks first if needed, and the lower one breaks later. The required markup will become Lorem Ipsumqwerty {{brpr|2}}of New York {{brpr|1}}is a good man. If it doesn't exist already, can they be made using modules? or a new project on mediawiki to create <bpx/> tags where x is the priority level has to be started? Thanks! ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 16:15, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

&nbsp is part of the HTML standard, and is interpreted by the web browser, not the mediawiki parser. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Actually, I wanted to know if mediawiki allows this kind of additional feature, whereby we can explicitly mention the level of Breaking priority. So that I can use it. ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 16:36, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Stop trying to control wrapping, especially of long phrases. Rendering doesn't work like that. Izno (talk) 19:25, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Tabs, error

I set up tabs for my user pages, and everything seems to be working except User talk:SandyGeorgia, which is displaying at only partial screen width from my iPhone and from an Android. Can anyone help? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:46, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Switch to desktop view. The mobile site apparently doesn't show the nice formatting you set up. RudolfRed (talk) 19:03, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Since it worked on seven pages out of eight, it had to be an error at User talk:SandyGeorgia. I found the problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:59, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Help with WP:HIDEBOTS

Unable to get this working. Following the directions I added the script and reloaded the browser cache. The watchlist now has a box at the top with "Smart watchlist settings" options. Click the box for "Enable hide user buttons", but then nothing changes in the watchlist, there is no box next to the username to hide that name. The Smart watchlist settings box has a purple error at the bottom "To use Smart Watchlist, enable 'enhanced recent changes' in your user preferences", but I am unable to find 'enhanced recent changes' in the preferences menus. -- GreenC 19:57, 11 February 2022 (UTC)