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If you urgently need some lists, Catscan 2 on WMFlabs can provide similar results. Just search for the needed category and check the correct page type in "Namespaces" (usually the talk page). A pre-defined example query for Anatomy templates would be "http://tools.wmflabs.org/catscan2/catscan2.php?categories=Template-Class_Anatomy_articles&ns[11]=1&doit=1" (nowiki here, because of [] characters). You can also search for specific importance levels, listing both class and importance category as selection criterion. Hope that helps a bit, while we wait for the "enwp10" project to recover (can't help with that - not a developer or tools writer). GermanJoe (talk) 00:58, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
I was logged in for other reasons and noticed this message. I am no longer a maintainer. I have requested to have my name removed from the list - I think that a cached version is being shown. I can say that the wp10 project could use one or more additional maintainers, but I cannot do it at this time. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:35, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
Is there a way to contributions search an editor's history of "undo" reverts?
If not, is there any possibility of implementing a tag, or preferably and easier a checkbox, that would filter the contribution list to show all the "undo" reverts implemented by an editor?
It appears that "tags" has "Rapid reverts" as an option, but when I put the option in the tags field, it doesn't work for registered editors (as indicated by the description "Non-autoconfirmed user rapidly reverting edits") –GodBlessYou2 (talk) 21:33, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
You can use the "Edit summary search" tool at the bottom of their contribs page, and search for "undid" or "reverted". There's really not a better way to do it, since revisions don't contain any other indication of whether or not they're a revert. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:44, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
I've checked this tool out for a number of editors who frequently do a total revert of other's edits. For some, what you suggest works fine. Some editors, however, delete the autogenerated comment line, replacing it with some other explanation, or even nothing useful for recognizing it as a revert.
As a diagnostic and evaluation tool, I think it would be helpful to be able to develop metrics on editors who have a tendency to "protect" articles with rapid deletions instead of working to refine articles collaboratively. Being able to identify how frequently editors revert without refinement would be a helpful tool. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons not to add an extra field to the database, but it would be helpful if there was an automated log showing that an edit completely reverted the previous edit. This would be helpful in being able to review the "revert" activity of specific editors for discussions regarding whether or not their pattern of reverts are generally helpful or generally disruptive or may indicate a tendency to WP:OWN an article.—GodBlessYou2 (talk) 22:18, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
If you use the "undo" link on a single edit, the default edit summary is "Undid revision nnnn by [[Special:Contributions/xxxx|xxxx]] ([[User talk:xxxx|talk]])". But if you are viewing a diff of two or more edits, and use the "undo" link, the default edit summary is blank. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:09, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
Interesting. A record of a reverting multiple edits should also be logged. Couldn't the database record that the "undo" link was used to initiate the edit and save a tag in the tag field (or some other field) indicating it was initiated as an "undo" when the edit is saved?–GodBlessYou2 (talk) 15:31, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
Well, Whatamidoing, I think it would be helpful to view a list of reverts made for many reasons, especially in cases where editors may have a pattern of rapidly reverting goodfaith edits rather than practicing WP:PRESERVE methods. It may also be useful in arbitration to be able to more easily see the pattern of reverts. Outside Wikipedia, other wiki's might benefit from being able to see reverts, too.--GodBlessYou2 (talk) 21:38, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Font-weight or '
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
If I'm writing a template, what would be better from technical point of view? Using <span style="font-weight:bold;">{{{1|}}}</span> or '''{{{1|}}}'''? I'm not talking about this kind of problem (an empty {{{1|}}}, which if using the ''' results in '), but generally, using span/''' is better, because ... ? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:43, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
That is a stretch. I would prefer CSS because it prevents reversing the bold wiki markup, ie. when text is already bold, it stays bold. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}17:21, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
Yes, the strong element "represents strong importance, seriousness, or urgency for its contents", whereas the b element "represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood". The first is semantic; the second is merely presentational. As for the span element, it "doesn't mean anything on its own", and relies on CSS styling to achieve a change of appearance, but cannot give a semantic meaning. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:10, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
XTools moved to Labs?
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
For those of us who still have User:Hedonil/common.js in our script .js, clicking on "See Full statistics" at the top of any article now flips to this: "301 Moved Permanently This tool has moved to a new location. You will be redirected to tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/index.php?pageid=27092849&project=en.wikipedia.org&uselang=en shortly."
And then it hangs in a loop forever and never really redirects to anything.
However, I do notice that Labs has all the XTools listed there. The problem is that the redirect doesn't really redirect. Can anyone please either correct that, or supply a new script to substitute for Hedonil's old one. Thanks. — Maile (talk) 00:10, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
That's because the maintainers agreed that we should segregate the /ec and /articleinfo tools into there own webservice to improve overall stability since they were the top two most likely culprits for locking the whole thing up. If it is getting stuck there, then articleinfo itself is locked up and you just need to ping one of the maintainers (Cyberpower678, Technical 13 and MusikAnimal) and one of us will restart it (I just restarted it now, FTR). :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)00:32, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, both of you. It is indeed getting stuck at Labs, because when I try to open the Page History tool directly from Labs, that's the one that hangs. Thank you for trying to restart it, but it still does not seem to be working. Still getting that message, either from the article or directly at Labs. — Maile (talk) 00:42, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Technical 13, Mozilla, Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:35.0, 5.0, Gecko 20100101, Firefox 35.0. OK, its really strange. As of this morning, progress. After I get the above message, it stalls a few seconds and then, the full page read out that always used to show. However...when I scroll down that to "Page views", the only thing there is a "bla" link. I click on that, and I get "Again something is messed up after Tool Labs database maintenance Sorry for that!No db-connection-" with an image that resembles a test pattern. So, therein, we are back to the original problem that has existed since Hedonil stopped editing. What happened to the daily page views? — Maile (talk) 13:31, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Today's part of "Tech Days" for the WMF dev staff, so he may be busy with event-related things right now. Things should mostly be back to normal by next week. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:08, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Navigation popups style change
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
I've reverted, seeing as the first couple of reactions weren't positive. If others could join the discussion about whether/how to tweak the styling, it would be appreciated. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪05:43, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Edit request references
Latest comment: 9 years ago12 comments4 people in discussion
Is there anything that can be done to clean up the references at the bottom of a talk page generated by edit requests example, this can be highly confusing if you don't know why they're there ? Mlpearc (open channel)19:09, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
@Technical 13: It is nothing to do with {{Edit protected}}, either. The automatic reflist was showing at the bottom of the page, in the "Reliability of Popjustice" section, which has no {{Edit protected}}. I placed a {{reflist-talk}} in the "Genres" section, because that is the only section containing <ref>...</ref>; it also has no {{Edit protected}}. The section between them, "Semi-protected edit request on 25 January 2015", does have a {{edit semi-protected}}, but that is irrelevant because that is neither the section with refs, nor the section where the refs were showing. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:18, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Redrose64, something was misunderstood here. I read the OP as is there a way that {{Reflist-talk}} can be added to the various {{Edit protected}} templates so that if there are references in the section below that, the reflist will show up. My answer to that interpretation is no, putting the call to list the references in the template above the references will not work in that way. My response had nothing specifically to do with the templates used. I hope this clarifies what I was saying, although it seems that Mlpearc understood what I was saying. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)20:58, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Mlpearc said "the references at the bottom of a talk page" and gave a link, I followed that link, looked for the references, and found them exactly where Mlpearc had said they were (at the bottom). I also noticed also that they were not in a section that bore an edit request, and regardless of that, I cleaned up these refs as requested. The link that I gave in my first post shows exactly how I did that. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:27, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
In my "Example" link, I wanted to show that there's no separation between the last section and the reference links. (also the article has nothing to do with the issue, just the example I choose). Mlpearc (open channel)21:39, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
It's not practical to automatically add a reflist, since it doesn't work if it's above the references, and there's nowhere suitable to add it below them. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:01, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
502 Bad Gateway
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
About five minutes ago I got the message "502 Bad Gateway". Does this indicate that my connectivity was lost due to a temporary condition? Robert McClenon (talk) 19:17, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
It often happens that a new user writes an article in his main user page and then moves it to the mainspace, taking his user talk page with it. Sometimes the redirect at the original talk page gets over-written with new messages, and the confusion becomes difficult to sort out. Would it be possible to arrange that main user talk pages do not, by default, move with the user page, but can only be moved by an admin? JohnCD (talk) 20:31, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
When you move a page, there is always an option (checked by default) to move the associated talk page. If you move the talk page by mistake, one can tag the redirect page with {{db-a7}} and an admin will delete it. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}20:51, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Yes, but the sort of inexperience newbie I am talking about doesn't understand that, and as the default is checked, his user talk page goes off into the mainspace with his article and probably gets deleted with it. JohnCD (talk) 21:24, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Template access to Preferences:Appearance:Offset (or local time generated from it)?
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
I'm doing a template that will show today in both the Western Calendar and the Hebrew Calendar. What I would like to have access to is the Preferences Appearances:Offset value (or something related) in order for the template to change what day it displays for the Western Calendar at Midnight based on the user preferences for offset (and the Hebrew date to change at 6PM). Is the information as to what the user has as their Offset value available to templates? (Asked on Help Desk, the suggestion was to post here)Naraht (talk) 13:53, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
That is not possible, as it would either show a version of the page cached with someone else's timezone preference or would fragment the caches. To do something like this, you'd have to have some sort of JavaScript (in common.js or a gadget) that would add in the user-specific date on the client side. Anomie⚔17:32, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
I guess that makes sense, everything that the offset affects are pages where they have to be calculated each time in areas like special. However it is possible to have templates that include the date and time, so this would cause a more rapid flush of the cache, correct?Naraht (talk) 15:20, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
@Anomie: And to the extreme, they can include time. Can this cause the cache to empty every second? (I'm curious as to whether there are things in pages that would force the cache to be emptied quicker) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Naraht (talk • contribs) 18:47, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
No, there is a minimum. Offhand I think it's one day, but I don't recall for certain and I'm not feeling like looking it up at the moment ;) Anomie⚔04:14, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
Accessing an article today the box says "Today Tuesday 27 January 2015 AD 7 Bahman 1393 SH 6 Rabi'al - Thani 1436 AH". The source code is "Today|AD|SH|AH". Actually there are curly brackets round that but I haven't included them because I don't know what will happen. When I tried to insert that template into a page all I got was a link to a U S television programme. Can someone explain how the workings of this template can be unearthed? - The template has just been updated, but I'd still like an answer to my question. 156.61.250.250 (talk) 09:45, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
More info: there is a "Template: Today" marked "This page is about U.S. TV program. It is not to be confused with Date - computing templates based on current time." Clicking on this link leads to "category Date - computing templates based on current time", and clicking on "Template:Today|AD|SH|AH" simply brings up what appears in the article. Now I see this text is editable (from "Editing Template: Today|AD|SH|AH") and the source text contains lots of parameters in curly brackets. Taking one of these at random, "CURRENT DAYNAME" produces the output "Wednesday". So where is the interface which enables editors to check whether a template does what it says on the tin? 156.61.250.250 (talk) 13:04, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
Hello, folks! Since the the original Reflinks tool is working again on his own server, User:GoingBatty suggests that we use another name for the new tool on Tool Labs. This makes sense, since it's confusing to have two tools with the same name, and the current name doesn't get the purpose of the tool (expanding bare references) across very well. The localised version of the name in Chinese is 来源扩充 (as in "citation expander") which makes its purpose clear. Any idea for a concise name? Zhaofeng Li [talk...contribs...] 00:37, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps we could have a naming contest on Zhaofeng Li's talk page, or a brainstorming session. I thought of "CiteIt", but that's a commercial product. Could we include all or part of Zhaofeng Li's name, or the English meaning of the characters, in honor of the creator? Any groan-worthy puns, like "AppleCiter"? – Margin1522 (talk) 04:40, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
While this is a great shot of the statue, I think that on mobile devices, this is probably not the photo we want to see here. The crop places undue visual emphasis on the statue's genitals. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spaceboss (talk • contribs) 18:49, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
Yes, that was the Wikipedia app. It's good to know how to change the picture it grabs for the header - it looks great now. Spaceboss (talk) 20:32, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for posting a link to the image. User:Deskana (WMF) may already have this problem on his list. I believe that this only affects the Android app (not what you would see if you used a web browser on an Android device). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. I've submitted a patch that changes the cropping of images to focus the top of the image rather than the centre. That should stop this kind of thing from happening. In the mean time, changing the image should also work. Thanks! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 17:54, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Watchlist changes curtailed
Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments5 people in discussion
This morninng I logged on to find my watchlist's list of changes severely shortened. It is only displaying changes as far back as ca. 11:00 pm last night (about 12 hours ago). I checked my preferences and they are unchanged, I should be seeing many more days' worth. Is this a know issue or something to report? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:27, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
To confirm, the "Show last" period displayed is stuck on "12 hours". When I click on a different value, the script seems to run but the setting sticks at 12 hours. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 16:04, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for the suggestions. Hving hit the probem with Chromium on Linux, I am now on my Andriod tablet and I can confirm that the probem perists. I tried the direct url for 30 days and that just resets the dispay to 12 hours as well. Seems to be some sort of corruption of my Wikipedia account settings? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 21:32, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
@Steelpillow: How many pages are on your watchlist? There used to be a threshold (which was once 1,000 pages) beyond which a user's watchlist would only display the last twelve hours of changes – I'm not sure if this is still the case. Also, how many changes are displayed on your watchlist? That could also have something to do with it. Graham8706:03, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Good thoughts. However the number of pages was 351, and I just now trimmed it to 343 and the problem persists. The last few weeks it has been above 343 and the list of changes has been displaying fine. The number of changes displayed is whatever were made in the last 12 hours: there is a user setting above the list for "Show last 1 | 2 | 6 | 12 hours |1 | 3 | 7 | 30 days" and whichever I select it just reverts to 12 hours selected. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 07:11, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
the url remains correct but the displayed list of changes does not match it. First two fields are: Days to show in Watchlist 5, Maximum number of changes... 250
@Graham87: Any threshold that exists is plenty more than 1,000 pages, since my watchlist is now 19,736 pages, and it will show me right back to 13:21, 29 December 2014 - a genuine 30 days. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:28, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Solved, thanks to PrimeHunter (talk·contribs). Maximum number of changes to show in expanded watchlist was 250. I recently added WP:ANI and that's when the problem kicked off - it ate all my allowance. Raising it to 1000 has solved the problem. All the 12 hr stuff seems like it must have been coincidence, as I was judging the duration set by the list that appeared. Many thanks to all who chipped in. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 16:16, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I asked here if I could borrow the 'In5' template and copy it to another wiki, but nobody's responded there yet. I would just copy the page's wikitext to a page with the same name on the other wiki (or could I just use template transclusion?) but the 'In5' template delegates the work that it does to a Lua module. How can I copy it, or do I even need to?
— RandomDSdevel (talk) 22:38, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately, I actually don't have administrative rights over there. I am, however, on good terms with one of that site's admins, so it couldn't hurt just to ask him if he might do it for me!
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
To deploy a patch for an urgent security vulnerability, the operations team at the Wikimedia Foundation are rolling out restarts of all servers. If something is down, from the wiki to labs to thumbnail renders/image scalers to whatever, never fear! they shall be back up very shortly. If the outage of something lasts for a really long time, do let me know. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 23:57, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society appears to be suffering from every script error imaginable, and I don't see the source---it appears to be an internal scripts issue. Perhaps this is related to the post above, but on the off chance that it isn't, can someone take a look and determine what's happening? Loading previous revisions seems to restore the page to working order for me.
@SiBr4:, sure enough, the title that was deleted matches a blacklist entry. Yeah, that MediaWiki software issue was a bit annoying; glad it's fixed now. Steel1943 (talk) 19:08, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Andy Mabbett, a better venue to bring this concern up would probably be MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist. (I was going to suggest that to you in the RFD discussion, but the discussion was closed before I had a chance. Someone who watches that page may have an idea how to add it to the title creation blacklist, but unfortunately, I personally am not sure what syntax would have to be added to the list to accomplish the task you are asking ... which I agree needs to be done somehow.) Steel1943 (talk) 19:06, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
(Never mind on that; looks like the deleted title already matches a blacklist entry, and was probably created as a result if the software issue that SiBr4 referenced above.) Steel1943 (talk) 19:11, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Stats broken?
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago13 comments4 people in discussion
I am a fairly new editor, but am having some difficulty with infoboxes. If for example, a person is say both Native American leader and a politician, Harry J. W. Belvin it does not appear that the boxes can be combined, thus, as I did there, does one have to use 2 boxes? Or is there a way to combine the information?
On several articles, though I have completed the tribal leadership position and language, that information does not actually show in the infobox. It may or may not be a critical piece of information to a programmer but for example in the case of Bill Osceola and Billy Osceola their information is so similar that ANY identifying characteristics that help one to determine which is the correct one may be critical. They did not hold the same tribal office, nor did they speak the same native tongue, but that information does not show in the infobox, though it was completed. Can these become visible fields?
I've echoed part of your question here: Template_talk:Infobox_Native_American_leader#Parameters_not_showing_up_in_Infobox ... I note that for language the template is wanting an ISO code and not a link to the language artice page, so for Bill Osceola that would be native_name_lang = mik ... and the infobox seems to use the "mik" to alert your browser that the nickname is in that language ... your browser yawns and ignores the info being thrown at it. I've not figured out what, if anything, happens to the known_for parameter info. --Tagishsimon(talk)23:34, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
@Tagishsimon: Thanks, I think. LOL. I have no earthly idea what an ISO code is, nor a how one figures out what one is. Programming is pretty much unintelligible to me, as a researcher. Can you tell me in simple language for a writer what that means and how one determines what it is? I think, that it doesn't matter if one knows the secret "code" or not as someone added the box to Minnie Evans (Potawatomi leader) and it still isn't visible. I admit freely that programming is way over my head, don't remotely understand it. SusunW (talk) 04:00, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
@Montanabw: totally confused. Andy responded at the link above on template talk, still have no clue what any of it means. Is he saying it won't show up even if you fill it out? I am wayyyyyy too old to learn so many new tricks. ;) SusunW (talk) 04:13, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
You're not intimately familiar with ISO 639-3 Susun? I'm shocked!. From the top. You quite reasonably want to be able to specify a language and a known_for sentence, so they'll appear in the infobox. I'm hoping that Andy, or someone else, will look at that in a short while. The ISO code for Mikasuki language is to be found at the bottom of the infobox on the Mikasuki language page - it's mik. But be clear: the native_name_lang parameter, into which you entered Mikasuki language, is not designed to display a language in the infobox, but instead to specify the language of the native_name of the individual, if such has been added to the infobox (and in a way - ISO codes - useful to browsers and the wider semantic web, but of no use to the human eye). You should only need to hunt for ISO codes if you add native_names and want to do your best for posterity by specifying the language of the native name in a machine-readable format. We - people on wikipedia who understands templates better than I - need to be responsive to your requirement to get a human readable "language" parameter, and a working "known_for" parameter. And if this comes to pass, then we get you to where you perhaps ought to be - able to use Mikasuki language rather than "mik". (There's also the open which infobox to use / should multiple infoboxen be used query yet to be answered.) hth. --Tagishsimon(talk)04:34, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
@Tagishsimon: You have made my night. I can hardly breathe from laughing so hard. I told Montanabw earlier that it would be an interesting conversation, but that there was a real possibly no communication would occur due to the language barrier ;) and here I am learning that humor is universal. While I (think I do) understand that the language parameter is meant to specify the correct spelling of the native name, from a writer's standpoint, I will have verified that with multiple sources. (In the case of Minnie, I verified it with 3 sources before I determined the 2nd syllable should be waht rather than what.) We call it preponderance of evidence. Not very scientific, possibly, but the way researchers work -- verifiable and weighted. I would much rather be able to see the mother-tongue if it can be determined, as an identifying biographical figure, than as a formula for determining how to spell their name properly, as, it may important for identification purposes, as previously identified, and how the name is spelled, has quite often changed over time. (My own name, case in point, has varied at numerous points in my lifetime, but I am still me.) SusunW (talk) 05:07, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I find your case for a human readable native langauge field unimpeachable, and I live in hope it'll be implemented. The machine readable code of which we spoke is not to do with spelling/verification, so much as to tell the web browser software that "this next bit's in French" on the off chance the browser wants to display French text in a different font, for instance. In the case of Minnie Evans, it turns up in the code which makes up the page as: <span class="nickname" lang="pot" xml:lang="pot"></span>. Which is nice. Meanwhile, I find no guidance on the question of multiple candidate infoboxes, although I'm still poking about on that question. I triple checked the spelling of your name before committing it to my preceding paragraph ... "verifiable and weighted", I muttered to myself, as I typed... --Tagishsimon(talk)05:25, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Indeed. Mi cabeza da vueltas. I suspect, that you are way too young to be at the muttering stage yet, so I apologize for reducing you to muttering, though I admit, it is often where I am in muddling through Wikipedia. The infobox is a very complicated tool o.O What if it is a woman, Native leader, politician? Oy vey, we input which box? Thank you for the levity. Nothing is so serious that it cannot be laughed about. SusunW (talk) 06:04, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Not so much "display text in a different font" (though that'd be possible), but to set the accent for (for example) text readers for blind users; or to tell translation software what's going on. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits14:55, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Spoiler: known_for has been fixed by Andy and is showing up on Bill Osceola. And consensus is being sought on the template talk page as to whether or not, and if so how to add a native language parameter to the infobox. --Tagishsimon(talk)15:12, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Thank you all so much. I am amazed at how fast y'all were able to resolve this. Total respect for what you do, to make the articles more reader friendly. SusunW (talk) 19:28, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Embedding Infobox officeholder
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
Many of the user talk templates were standardized several years ago, including block messages; Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace#Blocks. It appears MediaWiki:Ipbreason-dropdown was missed in the update. I'd like to correct them to match the correct template names, and add an informative note beside each one. For example,
{{spamusernameblock}}
would be changed to
{{uw-spamublock}} <-- Promotional username - Bad faith -->
{{spamusernameblock}} doesn't sound like a warning, and its name as is doesn't need an XML explanation, it's clear. But actually I don't care, if you think your solution is better, make it so. JFTR, <!-- –Be..anyone (talk) 16:52, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean. spamusernameblock doesn't sounds like a warning because it isn't a warning; it's a block notice. I'm proposing updating block reasons, not any warnings. I've posted to the sandbox subpage MediaWiki:Ipbreason-dropdown/sandbox and I'll wait at least a day or two for discussion. And yeah I forgot the ! in my example here. --Geniac (talk) 01:46, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Yes, Special:Block uses that page. That's my point; the options in that dropdown menu need updated and some of them need annotated. Another improvement I've made in the sandbox is to group some related block reasons together in a logical order. --Geniac (talk) 01:14, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
The uw- prefix simply indicates that a user talk template was a part of the standardisation effort of 2007, not that a template is necessarily a warning. That's neither here nor there; those are the current correct template names. --Geniac (talk) 03:45, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Unenforced non-blank edit summaries
Latest comment: 9 years ago13 comments4 people in discussion
Hello! While editing lead section of the Data scrubbing article, I've accidentally clicked on the "Save page" button instead of "Show preview" and my edit was saved with no edit summary. The trouble is that I have "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" ticked in my preferences and blank edit summaries shouldn't be allowed; that enforcement seems to be working as expected when editing non-lead sections, but fails to protect lead section edits. While editing that lead section, I've used the "edit" link provided by having "Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page" ticked in my preferences.
Perhaps this bug has something to do with the automated insertion of /* top */ into edit summaries when lead sections are edited, what was introduced about a year ago or so. However, IMHO it should be fixed, if you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 13:20, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
Dsimic, I'm not sure if this is what happened in your case here, but if you click save, and notice some text out of place or something and go back to fix it or whatnot I've found it easy to forget I clicked save once. When you click save again, it goes right through because you've already clicked once and technically gotten your blank summary warning. It's actually never prevented saving, it just takes you back to the edit window and doesn't let you know why. It can be very confusing to new users. I'll try to put in a phab ticket today if I can remember. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)14:20, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
@Technical 13: Yeah, I didn't mean that edits with no summaries are completely impossible, instead I had those "first click" warnings in mind. Sorry for not describing it more precisely. However, just to make sure, I've tried to reproduce this bug, and a test edit on a lead section, with no edit summary provided, was saved immediately after clicking on "Save page" with no warnings or anything. So, that's what happened in the first place. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:44, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
I really don't have time right now, but what I would do is modify the gadget to check if the `warn on blank summary` option is activated if ( mw.user.options.get( 'forceeditsummary' ) === 1 ) { ... and then hijack the Save page button to see if ( $( '#wpSummary' ).val() === '/* top */' ) { ... and if it does throw confirm( 'Blank edit summary detected,\npress [OK] to save anyways\nor[Cancel] to go back' ) and then if they click OK $( '#editform' ).submit(); or if they click cancel do $( '#wpSummary' ).focus();. Anyways, I don't currently have access to gadget pages and I'm too busy to work up and test it in a sandbox at this time. Ping me back in a couple three weeks or so if you can't find someone else to do it and I'd be happy to. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)14:52, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Went ahead and had a look at includes/EditPage.php from MediaWiki 1.24.1: basically, MediaWiki sends an MD5 hash of the default edit summary as a value of the form variable wpAutoSummary on edit pages, and compares it when the form is submitted later to see whether a summary was entered (better said, whether it was modified). Gadget-edittop.js jumps into the middle of that and pretty much "breaks" the relationship between the default edit summary and its stored MD5 hash. In more detail, Gadget-edittop.js presets the summary using GET variable summary, what is additionally handled in includes/EditPage.php as a fix for bug #17416: if submitted using &summary=, edit summary is checked only to be non-empty (the default summary is forcibly assumed to be empty) – that's why /* top */ is accepted.
Thus, Gadget-edittop.js should instead set the summary by modifying wpSummary form varible upon the initial loading of edit pages, and should also initially set the wpAutoSummary to the value of md5('/* top */'). That should correct this issue, by establishing the same relationship as if the setting of a default edit summary was performed by MediaWiki. Would something like that be doable in Gadget-edittop.js? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 15:01, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Well, that's what the code in MediaWiki 1.24.1 does (see lines 2428–2433 in includes/EditPage.php). If that behavior is changed, then it seems that Gadget-edittop.js should be working as expected with no modifications. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:04, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Hm, the whole Phab:T19416 is like "well, I like my waffles with xyz syrup" with no real explanation and no analysis on what else could be affected by such changes. Maybe I'm missing something, but in a request like this it would be important to state where pre-specified summaries shouldn't be validated to be different when a page is submitted; as-is, IMHO it doesn't look like it's about a bug or specific misbehavior. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:39, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago16 comments7 people in discussion
Issues sometimes arise with browsers displaying the wrong form (Chinese or Japanese) of a particular character (e.g. 直 versus 直). Typically they seem to default to Chinese, which is inappropriate for Japanese content. Japanese (or Chinese) can be forced using the HTML "lang" parameter or various templates that presumably generate this internally, but it is highly tedious to do this throughout a long article that makes extensive use of such characters. Instead, what is needed is a way to set a default (Chinese or Japanese) for a whole article. Is this currently possible, and, if not, could I place a request for it to be considered as an enhancement? 109.157.11.14 (talk) 21:36, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Do you mean an example of a character that looks different in the two languages? I gave an example at the start of my post. If they look the same to you then it must be due to some local issue on your machine (e.g. maybe you don't have a Japanese font installed). If you don't mean this then I'm afraid I don't understand what you are asking. 109.157.11.14 (talk) 22:04, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
For those like me who didn't know the issue, it appears that some Unicode characters are supposed to render differently depending whether they are part of a Chinese or Japanese text. {{lang|zh|直}} and {{lang|ja|直}} contain the same character 直 renders as: 直 and 直 contain the same character 直. The zh and ja version render differently for me. The third unmarked version renders like the Japanese in my Firefox 35.0.1 on Windows Vista. So does all three in the nowiki text. {{lang}} merely adds a "span lang=". I see exactly the same if "span lang=" is made directly. <span lang="zh">直</span> and <span lang="ja">直</span> contain the same character 直 renders as: 直 and 直 contain the same character 直. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:04, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Hes not saying anywhere is rendering it wrong, hes saying its tedious to have to set the language for every character, and would like to set it once for the whole page. Could a template at the top of the page set a variable that could then be read as a default value for unicode display later in the page? Gaijin42 (talk) 22:09, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
As I understand it, the display is potentially incorrect in any article that does not explicitly set the language (directly or indirectly via a template) every time Japanese or Chinese characters are used. Whether it is actually incorrect depends on what the browser does by default. Note also that most characters render the same. Only a few are different. 109.157.11.14 (talk) 22:38, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
When I read "whole article" then I infer that certain articles have a problem. What articles and what are some of the wrong characters in that article? --Gadget850talk22:45, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I can't remember now, and it doesn't matter. It is a general usability/maintainablity thing. For example, Japanese grammar has masses of Japanese text with no language set. If there any any uses of these dual-form characters (I haven't checked the whole article!) then they would likely display incorrectly. Rather than going through checking every line and applying "lang=", a better solution is clearly to set the language once at the top of the article. 109.157.11.14 (talk) 22:50, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
The lang= attribute is already set at the top of every article, and it is set to lang="en" because this is the English Wikipedia. On the Japanese Wikipedia, pages have lang="ja" set at the top. This code must match the language of the page as a whole: if any part is not in the default language, that part should be marked up as being in that other language (whether by using <span>...</span><div>...</div> or some other element isn't important), but if that element has (say) the lang="ja" attribute, it cannot enclose any text that is not in Japanese, unless that text is itself marked up using (say) <span lang="en">...</span> for text in English. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:33, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
It couldn't override the main language being English, of course. What would be convenient is a directive "everywhere you find Chinese/Japanese characters, set the language as Japanese (or Chinese)". 109.157.11.14 (talk) 00:12, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Theoretically, you could write a parser function that could set a value like this for the whole page (a little like DEFAULTSORT). However, while it could work on a small subset of pages, I can see inherent problems on getting it to work for all pages in all languages. Even with a language pairing like English and Japanese that use different character sets, it would be difficult for a program to reliably tell which content was English and which was Japanese. For example, 三菱東京UFJ銀行 (Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ Bank) should be tagged as being Japanese, but I could easily see a program mistakenly tagging the "UFJ" in the middle as being in English. And it only gets more complicated when you consider language pairings with the same or similar character sets, or pages that contain text in three or more languages. Tagging Japanese text manually may be a pain, but as far as I can see it is the only reliable way of getting it right. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪11:44, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Redrose64 is right: every English Wikipedia page has the language set to English by the MediaWiki software. Where other languages such as Chinese or Japanese are used, we have templates to set the language code. Without specific page examples, I can't see what is going on and I can't help. --Gadget850talk23:53, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I have given you a page example. I believe I have explained the issue clearly enough. I don't know why you can't seem to understand it. 109.157.11.14 (talk) 00:09, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
I see you did point out Japanese grammar. ("I can't remember now, and it doesn't matter." made me skip over the example). All of the Japanese text should be enclosed in {{lang-ja}} for proper language support. As PrimeHunter pointed out, the characters render differently when different language templates are used or not used. We have a series of templates for language support. --Gadget850talk00:41, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
In both Chinese and Japanese 直 (U+76F4) is the same character with the same meaning. The difference is that the glyph in Chinese fonts looks different from the glyph in Japanese fonts. This FAQ from unicode.org explains how this works, using the example of this character (U+76F4). So if we had a global tag for the whole page, we would be telling the browser that we want one font or the other for characters in the Asian code range. I think that modern browsers already have heuristics to handle this and usually get it right. For example, Japanese grammar and Chinese grammar both display fine for me, even though neither specifies the lang= for all characters. The problems tend to come up when pages contain mixed languages. One example is this page. If you look at the HTML for that page, it handles the 3 different glyph sets in the same way that we do, by wrapping the characters in "lang=ja" or "lang=zh-Hant" spans. We can always do the same thing on Wikipedia if the characters are not displaying properly. – Margin1522 (talk) 06:24, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Help needed with recursive template
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion
I wrote a template which takes as its single unnamed parameter either a year or the word 'current'. In the latter case it determines from wikidata what the current year is, then calls itself with that value.
Documentation tells me recursion is fine for one level. However I got a recursion error straight away. Then I tried using safesubst: which seemed to work, but only later did I see that it did a regular substitution. Currently the only valid years for input are 2007 and 2010, but at the next census-like point there will be a later year, which I want 'current' to reach. That won't happen with substituted code. I know I can break this into two templates, one to determine the current year which is invoked from the other. But I'd like to know whether recursion is allowed or not.
click "show" at right to view
1st version gave recursion error
{{#switch:{{{1|}}}
|2007=<ref name=NSO07>{{cite web |publisher=National Statistics Office |url=http://www.census.gov.ph/data/census2007/h070000.pdf |title=Population and Annual Growth Rates by Province, City and Municipality: Central Visayas: 1995, 2000 and 2007 |archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20110624035646/http://www.census.gov.ph/data/census2007/h070000.pdf |archivedate=2011-06-24}}</ref>
|2010=<ref name=NSO10>{{cite web |url=http://www.census.gov.ph/sites/default/files/attachments/hsd/pressrelease/Central%20Visayas.pdf |title=Total Population by Province, City, Municipality and Barangay: as of May 1, 2010 |work=2010 Census of Population and Housing |publisher=National Statistics Office |accessdate=1 April 2013}}</ref>
|current={{PH census|{{#invoke:Wikidata|getQualifierDateValue|P1082|P585|FETCH_WIKIDATA|y}}}}
}}<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>
then safesubst: (or so I thought)
{{#switch:{{{1|}}}
|2007=<ref name=NSO07>{{cite web |publisher=National Statistics Office |url=http://www.census.gov.ph/data/census2007/h070000.pdf |title=Population and Annual Growth Rates by Province, City and Municipality: Central Visayas: 1995, 2000 and 2007 |archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20110624035646/http://www.census.gov.ph/data/census2007/h070000.pdf |archivedate=2011-06-24}}</ref>
|2010=<ref name=NSO10>{{cite web |url=http://www.census.gov.ph/sites/default/files/attachments/hsd/pressrelease/Central%20Visayas.pdf |title=Total Population by Province, City, Municipality and Barangay: as of May 1, 2010 |work=2010 Census of Population and Housing |publisher=National Statistics Office |accessdate=1 April 2013}}</ref>
|current={{safesubst:PH census|{{#invoke:Wikidata|getQualifierDateValue|P1082|P585|FETCH_WIKIDATA|y}}}}
}}<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>
which became
{{#switch:{{{1|}}}
|2007=<ref name=NSO07>{{cite web |publisher=National Statistics Office |url=http://www.census.gov.ph/data/census2007/h070000.pdf |title=Population and Annual Growth Rates by Province, City and Municipality: Central Visayas: 1995, 2000 and 2007 |archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20110624035646/http://www.census.gov.ph/data/census2007/h070000.pdf |archivedate=2011-06-24}}</ref>
|2010=<ref name=NSO10>{{cite web |url=http://www.census.gov.ph/sites/default/files/attachments/hsd/pressrelease/Central%20Visayas.pdf |title=Total Population by Province, City, Municipality and Barangay: as of May 1, 2010 |work=2010 Census of Population and Housing |publisher=National Statistics Office |accessdate=1 April 2013}}</ref>
|current={{#switch:{{#invoke:Wikidata|getQualifierDateValue|P1082|P585|FETCH_WIKIDATA|y}}
|2007=<ref name=NSO07>{{cite web |publisher=National Statistics Office |url=http://www.census.gov.ph/data/census2007/h070000.pdf |title=Population and Annual Growth Rates by Province, City and Municipality: Central Visayas: 1995, 2000 and 2007 |archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20110624035646/http://www.census.gov.ph/data/census2007/h070000.pdf |archivedate=2011-06-24}}</ref>
|2010=<ref name=NSO10>{{cite web |url=http://www.census.gov.ph/sites/default/files/attachments/hsd/pressrelease/Central%20Visayas.pdf |title=Total Population by Province, City, Municipality and Barangay: as of May 1, 2010 |work=2010 Census of Population and Housing |publisher=National Statistics Office |accessdate=1 April 2013}}</ref>
|current={{PH census|{{#invoke:Wikidata|getQualifierDateValue|P1082|P585|FETCH_WIKIDATA|y}}}}
}}
}}<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>
As far as I know, no recursion is possible in wikicode. So you would have to use a simple ifeq on the main template and move the main code to the subtemplate. I have done this to Template:PH census (feel free to revert) but I'm not sure if the wikidata fetch is working correctly yet — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:18, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
A template may call itself once; a second level of recursion will throw "Template loop detected: Template:Template sandbox" (or whatever the template name is). --Redrose64 (talk) 16:49, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
I hope you don't mind, I tucked some of that away in a collapsed section as it was making the page render in a way that was impossible to read. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:17, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
"it determines from wikidata what the current year is, then calls itself with that value." That's a terrible use for recursion, and there's no way to make that work. Either write your code in Lua instead, or use a /core template. Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:36, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
"current year" was a confusing description. If "current" is passed then the template pulls the census year from the Wikidata entry for the article. You could just make the test in the switch like this: {{#switch:{{#ifeq:{{{1}}}|current|{{#invoke:Wikidata|getQualifierDateValue|P1082|P585|FETCH_WIKIDATA|y}}|{{{1}}}}}|...}}. A subtemplate also works fine. I agree an attempt at recursion is a bad idea. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:54, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Find red links
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
There is in AWB: make a list of pages in the category, save the list, convert it to a pipe-separated list, and make a new list using "Links on page (only redlinks)" for those pages. If you don't use AWB, I could make the list for you if you gave the category name. SiBr4 (talk)21:41, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Over the past month or two, I have had problems using our eMail interface (on 4 or 5 occasions, most recently on this timestamped day). The messages were either prolonged in delay, or not delivered at all – in every instance, I was not sent a copy of the email either, which my preferences stipulate, should happen. Any ideas? Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 06:59, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
For those unaware, having an email account with Yahoo!, AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, GMail, or any other email provider that has set their Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) policy to p=reject will prevent using Special:EmailUser. Since the MediaWiki software is set up to spoof sending emails with the from address set to pretend it is sending directly from your mail client that has a domain that does not match the sender domain, it causes it to be rejected by mail hosts instead of sending directly from the local domain with the reply to address set as your address. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)13:06, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Slight clarification yahoo.com and aol.com have set DMARC policy to p=reject [5][6]. Others such as gmail.com and outlook.com (the new hotmail.com) and mail.ru have a setting of p=none [7][8][9]. Yahoo explains their policy here. Some other sites don't publish records. --Mrjulesd(talk)13:43, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Thank you Technical 13 and Mrjulesd. I am curious, will this situation also affect one's ability to get a password reset sent to the email address? It may seem obvious to the more technically fluent within our midst; but I must ask: what is a good/best manner of mitigation, or is this somehow in our own best interest; whereas instead, I should adopt a mindset of acceptance?--John Cline (talk) 13:55, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
John, it shouldn't interfere with the ability to get a password reset because those emails are actually coming from the the domain they say they are coming from. Those emails come from something like noreply@wikimedia.org and have a sender set as noreply@wikimedia.org. The issue is when we try to send email from one user to another and the emails actually come from noreply@wikimedia.org but the sender is set to ThisUser@yahoo.com. The way to fix this of course, although apparently not as simple as it seems, is to have the email come from noreply@wikimedia.org, have the sender set to noreply@wikimedia.org, and have the reply-to set to ThisUser@yahoo.com. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)14:15, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
And to be very clear, this isn't broken on Wikipedia's end, some mail provider have decided to block these messages and the complaint technically should be from their customers to them (customer being a VERY loose word here as these are free providers whose actual customers are advertisers, email users are their product). I agree with T13 above that we could band-aid our system and the primary arguments against it all seem to be along the line of "sending a message to these providers that they shouldn't do this" - however I think the chance the providers will actually care about out message is slim to none. @Technical 13:, I haven't followed this very closely, but if this is enwiki specific any reason an RFC to change this behavior would be rejected by the foundation? — xaosfluxTalk14:52, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
xaosflux, it's not enwp specific. It affects all MediaWiki software customers. That said, I still think that we should hold an RfC on whether or not we should formally complain to the foundation as a community that is a customer. The issue I have with calling it a bandaid to fix something that email providers shouldn't do is that more and more email providers are doing it. Where is the threshold when the foundation accepts this is forward progress and will be the accepted norm? This is a question I can not answer and would love to hear feedback from the foundation on. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)15:05, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Technical 13 I won't drop the bandaid calling :) , but do think we should change this configuration. I'm missing the why this has to be a production process change for everyone -- even if it is a software change-should be able to be parameterized per project, no? — xaosfluxTalk15:10, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I need to dig out the code for that special page and how it is processed to know for sure how much work it would be but it is certainly possible to be able to have it per project. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)16:12, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
@John Cline: One workaround at the moment is to have a second e-mail address, for example with gmail.com or outlook.com. Their current DMARC policy allows spoofing. But of course that could change in the future. Also, if anyone from a yahoo.com address tried to send you an e-mail through the system you'd suffer the same problem.
@everyone surely the best solution for the mediawiki software to spoof sender e-mail addresses slightly differently? For example if example@yahoo.com sent an e-mail, the mediawiki software could spoof the e-mail address something like example@WIKIPEDIA_yahoo.com? Of course to reply the e-mail address would have to altered, but at least the e-mail would be received. --Mrjulesd(talk)15:56, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Altering is not even needed. All they need to do as add an appropriate reply-to: field and clicking reply will automatically put in the correct address. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)16:12, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Urbane Israel
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Categorization of stub tags doesn't work on creation
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
For some reason, when I've been creating new stub tags, when I save them the first time they don't show up in the category. This is always fixed by saving it the second time without editing it (null edit). I saw this both with {{Arizona-sport-stub}} (created as upmerged to 2 populated categories) and to {{NYC-sport-stub}}. Any idea why that's happenning? עוד מישהוOd Mishehu09:57, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
@Od Mishehu: The {{asbox}} template - which is the core of every stub template - was Lua-ised a few days ago, so it's best to point out new problems at Template talk:Asbox, which has 45 watchers including me. Or at Module talk:Asbox, if you want to attract a possibly more knowledgeable (but smaller, just 5 watchers) audience. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:05, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
How to - create both category and category talk page with template
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
I am a little stuck, probably just a little slow in understanding. I have been creating templates for the creation of categories and I am wondering how I could using the same template also create category talk pages. For instance, consider {{Media companies established in year cat}}; in addition to creating the category, I would like to create the associated talk page and put {{WikiProject Companies|class=category}} as the starting content. I've looked a bit at the Magic Word information in mediawiki, but I'm having a tough time understanding specifically how to do this. Thanks for your input. (please include {{reply|ceyockey}} in responding so I can get direct notice of your input -- thanks) --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 16:04, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
@Ceyockey: Templates don't create pages (categories or otherwise) - people and bots do. Do you mean that you want to put a link into a template, where if somebody clicks that link, they get taken to the edit screen? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:09, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: OK - simpler explanation. In creating a page such as Category:Media companies established in 2015, if I apply the template {{Media companies established in year cat}} as the content and save the page, not only will the category page contain the desired content, but also the associated talk page will be created bearing the content {{WikiProject Companies}}. In short, by creating the category page, the category talk page will also be created without having to manually add content to that page (i.e. will not have to click on the red talk tab and manually add the wikiproject template. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 16:14, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
P.S. I do understand it might not be possible to do this, that, in fact, one might still need to click on a link to invoke creation of the talk page. If that is the case, might it be possible to auto-populate the newly created page with the desired content so that one need only save the page rather than manually inserting content. Thanks. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 16:30, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
You say "not only will the category page contain the desired content, but also the associated talk page will be created bearing the content {{WikiProject Companies}}" - I've looked at the template and it has nothing special that might do this. It's transcluded on two category pages, Category:Media companies established in 1957 and Category:Media companies established in 1958; both have a talk page, which was created by yourself and going by the page history there is no evidence that it was automatic - you must have clicked on the "talk" tab, pasted in {{WikiProject Companies|class=category}} and saved (please note, |class=category is redundant). Can you give an example of a talk page which was clearly created automatically, in the manner that you describe? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:48, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Ceyockey, it doesn't work that way. If this is a common application however, a userscript could be created to allow easy creation of both pages in a minimal number of clicks. Let me know if this is desired, exactly what needs to be posted on which pages, and a list of possible editors or projects that would be interested in this. Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)16:50, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Create new pages with 2 processes to semi-automatically create pages with some predefined content. Depends on the number of uses, if it's really efficient to dig deeper into that somewhat complex topic (or do it manually like our forefathers :) ). I haven't used that approach yet. GermanJoe (talk) 16:54, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
Date parsing
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Let's say I feed the following string into a template: 20150131. I would like the template to spit out the previous and next dates, which would be 20150130 and 20150201 respectively. Is this doable with templates on Commons or templates on another project which I could copy to Commons? Magog the Ogre (t • c) 18:03, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago13 comments6 people in discussion
Let me preface this by saying I am only asking for technical information on the feasibility of this idea. I just want to know if we can do it before opening a discussion of whether we should. Thanks.
So, the actual idea: rollback as a user right is deprecated and instead it becomes an optional gadget like Twinkle that autoconfirmed users can turn on or off for themselves in the "gadgets" tab of their preferences.
Is that possible, and if so can it be done locally or do we need the foundation to get involved? Also, any guesses about the time frame to implement it should it be approved? Beeblebrox (talk) 17:23, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
The simplest way would be to just give rollback rights to all autoconfirmed users, hide the actual links with CSS, then have a gadget to override that and display them. Another way would be to use $wgGroupsAddToSelf, which could allow autoconfirmed users to add themselves to the rollback group. Both would require relatively trivial changes to the site configuration, but no changes to the software itself. Mr.Z-man17:32, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Just remember we'd still need some way to restrict access to tools like Huggle. Huggle should not be enabled as a gadget. Maybe that can be what the "vandal fighter" right is for =P — MusikAnimaltalk17:38, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
I might also add if we do create a separate right for Huggle and others, that would conflict with the cross-wiki support of those tools, as they look for rollback on other wikis but will have to be updated to look for a different right on enwiki. We'd also need to update STiki, Igloo and probably others as well. The biggest problem, I think, is that the sneakiest of the sneakiest vandals could create an account, wait till they become autoconfirmed, enable the rollback gadget, then use an older version of Huggle to cause massive damage. All I'm saying is we'd need to somehow ensure users can't get access to powerful semi-automated tools without explicitly being granted the permission on a case by case basis (except is STiki where you automatically get access after 1000 mainspace edits). — MusikAnimaltalk20:28, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Since I don't that's WP:BEANS, I'll give some hints here. For those interested, it's possible as 1) It's a wiki 2) All the userright checking is done client-side 3) Huggle can do "software rollback". Zhaofeng Li [talk...contribs...] 00:13, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I'd support rolling rollback into reviewer and eliminating the extra hat. The reason I say roll it into the next closest grantable right instead of autoconfirmed is so that the community will still have control over who has it without having to revoke the lowest level of access. I'd suggest doing it as a two step process, first add the rollbacker rights to reviewer explicitly. Then give the developers and the community a (few) months notice that rollbacker is being deprecated and inform them they need to update their code accordingly. Make sure that all notices mention that assistance will be available for those in need of it. Then, when whatever is agreed to be a good amount of time has elapsed, run a script that removes the rollback group from all users listed in it and adds those users to reviewer if they are not already a part of that group. Once that is done it will be safe to eliminate the unused and unneeded group entirely. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)16:21, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
So far I am only seeing one post here that seems to be responding to the question I actually asked. there is a reason I asked here, I am only looking to see if this is possible, this board is not the place to discuss an actual policy change. If I'm reading Mr Z-man's answer correctly the answer is that it probably is possible. Does anyone else have a take on that? Beeblebrox (talk) 18:37, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Since Twinkle already does it, it is obviously possible. The only question left is what to do with the rollback group itself. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)19:08, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I think they are of limited value. And not accessible, so of no use to screen readers. The same for the locally added PDF icon. --Gadget850talk21:42, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There was a security issue on Wikimedia Labs. Many Labs tools were down after the issue was fixed. [10]
Software changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 4 (calendar).
The "Save page" button in the VisualEditor toolbar is now blue rather than green. This is the same as on the mobile site. [11]
You can now edit pages on the draft namespace with VisualEditor on the Russian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia. You can ask to get VisualEditor for a namespace on your wiki. When your community agrees, ask in Phabricator. [12][13]
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi, XTools are wonderful. Thanks ! However it may need some improvements.I recently checked some articles I've created and I saw some articles which are live but labelled "deleted" and also some others which I'haven't created. Nedim Ardoğa (talk) 20:21, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
VisualEditor News 2015—#1
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's appearance, the coming Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.
The Wikimedia Foundation has named its top priorities for this quarter (January to March). The first priority is making VisualEditor ready for deployment by default to all new users and logged-out users at the remaining large Wikipedias. You can help identify these requirements. There will be weekly triage meetings which will be open to volunteers beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Tell Vice President of Engineering Damon Sicore, Product Manager James Forrester and other team members which bugs and features are most important to you. The decisions made at these meetings will determine what work is necessary for this quarter's goal of making VisualEditor ready for deployment to new users. The presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code is particularly appreciated. Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins.
Due to some breaking changes in MobileFrontend and VisualEditor, VisualEditor was not working correctly on the mobile site for a couple of days in early January. The teams apologize for the problem.
Recent improvements
The new design for VisualEditor aligns with MediaWiki's Front-End Standards as led by the Design team. Several new versions of the OOjs UI library have also been released, and these also affect the appearance of VisualEditor and other MediaWiki software extensions. Most changes were minor, like changing the text size and the amount of white space in some windows. Buttons are consistently color-coded to indicate whether the action:
starts a new task, like opening the ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽ dialog: blue ,
takes a constructive action, like inserting a citation: green ,
might remove or lose your work, like removing a link: red , or
is neutral, like opening a link in a new browser window: gray.
The TemplateData editor has been completely re-written to use a different design (T67815) based on the same OOjs UI system as VisualEditor (T73746). This change fixed a couple of existing bugs (T73077 and T73078) and improved usability.
Search and replace in long documents is now faster. It does not highlight every occurrence if there are more than 100 on-screen at once (T78234).
Editors at the Hebrew and Russian Wikipedias requested the ability to use VisualEditor in the "Article Incubator" or drafts namespace (T86688, T87027). If your community would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace on your wiki, then you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.
Looking ahead
The Editing team will soon add auto-fill featuresfor citations. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to contribute to the Citoid service's definitions for each website, to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections.
We will need editors to help test the new design of the special character inserter, especially if you speak Welsh, Breton, or another language that uses diacritics or special characters extensively. The new version should be available for testing next week. Please contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF) if you would like to be notified when the new version is available. After the special character tool is completed, VisualEditor will be deployed to all users at Phase 5 Wikipedias. This will affect about 50 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh. The date for this change has not been determined.
Join the weekly bug triage meetings beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Contact James F. for more information.
Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 19:00 UTC.
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
It would be convenient if there was a Thank link on Recent Changes pages. I would suggest this as an update to the software, or barring that, if there's a user script that adds it, I would use that. I use RC pages a lot for patrolling changes, and having a Thank link there would reduce steps I take to thank other users. Stevie is the man!Talk • Work15:05, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I think the answer to this is not a technical issue but raher the fact that you should actually view a diff before thanking someone for it. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:39, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
It would be cool if it was made an option in popups when you hover over a diff. Although I suppose if you added everything to popups that was "cool", it would soon become overwhelmed with options. --Floquenbeam (talk) 20:58, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I think that you should make this suggestion "official" by filing it as a feature request under the Thanks project in Phabricator:. (If you need help, then leave a note on my talk page.) I can't guarantee that it would get acted on any time soon, but filing it would put your idea in the list for future consideration. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:17, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Content not showing subsections
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, the contents on the following page is not displaying subsections. I have played around with it and not been able to get it work. Can anyone look at Operation Brevity and see what the problem is? RegardsEnigmaMcmxc (talk) 19:40, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
Toggle between default view and customized settings?
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion
I sometimes wish to browse Wikipedia as a new user and see things as they would. On my own account, I have lots of settings configured. Is there a quick way to toggle all personalization off and see things as a new user would, in such a way that I could easily turn my settings back on? Blue Rasberry (talk)21:03, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
Alternatively, install a second browser on your computer. I have five (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari), and sometimes run two or more simultaneously (all five at once maxes out my PC memory), but I only log in using one at a time. The logged-out browsers (usually Chrome and IE) show me what a good majority of new users will see. For cases when I need to test for a user who is logged-in but with basic settings, I log in as Redrose64a (talk·contribs), who with just one edit, isn't even autoconfirmed. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:27, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
The tool is made by User:Σ. [16] and [17] give the same results while [18] misses all results from section edits but finds all others. So it appears that if "Don't search within /* sections */" is enabled then the search always becomes case sensitive. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:04, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I'm looking at two templates - {{AMQ}} and {{AM station data}}. {{AMQ}} can be used on its own in an article. However, it's also an element of {{AM station data}}.
When I look at "What links here" for {{AMQ}}, I can see all the articles where the template is being transcluded, but that's regardless of which of the two ways it's being transcluded. It feels like there ought to be a way to identify articles that transclude it directly - that is, the article specifically uses {{AMQ}} - but for the life of me, I can't figure it out.
A way to do that is to compare the lists of transclusions of both templates to find out which pages transclude {{AMQ}} but not {{AM station data}} (easy if you have AWB). That will however not include pages that directly transclude both separately.
You can also just search for pages that contain "{{AMQ" in the source code, which WP's new CirrusSearch can do (a regex is needed to search for the brackets). A probably more accurate method, which uses AWB, is the one I used here. SiBr4 (talk)22:28, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm on a Mac, so AWB won't be an option. However, I've bookmarked that search link so I can use it in the future (and for similar cases) - I won't pretend to understand how that was built, but that's the beauty of bookmarks. Thanks! Mlaffs (talk) 23:03, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Help requested
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Over at my talk page - the CRG Int'l threads. We're having a problem getting Legobot to accept his request at CHU. I think I've got rid of a copied | , but Legobot is reading an ASCII 39 code instead of the ' that it wants. I'm getting out of my depth now. Peridon (talk) 20:43, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Talk pages on Android devices.
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
I am really confused about talk pages when using Android devices. I am using the wikipedia app, but can't see the normal PC page layout with the talk page tab, except (strangely) on this particular page since I have started a new section by posing this question. Apologies if Im asking a stupid question.
In conclusion then, how do I get e.g. Chrome apo or the wikipedia app on Android to display like a PC. 1812ahill (talk) 18:15, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
@1812ahill: The Wikipedia app is meant to provide a simpler mobile view of articles. You can get a desktop view on Chrome, however. Visit any article through Chrome and then scroll to the very bottom - you should see a "Desktop" link. Clicking it will make Wikipedia start displaying like they would on a PC. You can switch back to mobile view by scrolling to the bottom again and selected "Mobile view". ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs18:33, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
@1812ahill: I suggest ditching the app and just using your web browser (whether the default of Firefox, etc), which offers a nice mobile-oriented view and has a lot of options that the app is missing. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 05:47, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Broken layout of Lua module page
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
I think the multiline comment at the top has confused something (and check the "Categories: %s" at the bottom!). I would try a simple "--" before each of the introductory comment lines. It's not the import. Johnuniq (talk) 20:55, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Vandalism showing up in Android app, but not the article itself
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
On the Wikipedia mobile app (Android), viewing the Tom Brady article brings up this (not my image); see the image caption, right below the page title. It's been like this for a couple days I believe, though the article doesn't contain the vandalism anywhere as far as I can tell - and I can't find any recent edits that inserted the text, either. Anyone know what's going on? Caching problem? Is the vandalism transcluded from elsewhere? ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs21:31, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi,
I just installed /* User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks.js */
importScript( 'User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks.js' );// Backlink: User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks.js over my user page: User:Mr RD/common.js However I'm not sure how do I use it? Please help me here. Does it work like Twinkle or Proveit? Or is there something else I must do? Thanks. Mr RD09:51, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Am I in the right place to ask, why the "Bytes per article" statistics had not been refreshed for the last 12 months and why there is no update for the EnWiki stats for more than 5 years? Is there a chance that the stats will be updated in the near future? Gyurika (talk) 11:56, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
restore IPA symbols that have been removed from editing window
Latest comment: 9 years ago14 comments5 people in discussion
The editing window has been revamped, and tone letters have been removed from the IPA (under 'special characters'). Perhaps others as well. Could someone restore them? There are also lots of useless entries, such as ʙ̩: If someone really needs a syllabic bilabial trill (and it's likely that in the entire history of WP no-one ever has), then it can be entered with two keystrokes. — kwami (talk) 22:21, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
@Kwamikagami: presuming you use monobook, i think the problem is in User:Kwamikagami/monobook.js. some time ago, the script loading logic was somewhat changed, and now, if there is an error in your personal scripts, some of the system's gadgets and scripts will not load. your personal monobook script has a problem (it contains a line that was probably meant for your personal css file rather than your personal js file).
the problematic line is .IPA { font-family: 'Gentium', 'Charis SIL', serif; }. my guess is that simply removing this line, will resurrect the functionality you lost. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 23:16, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! That restored CharInsert under the edit window. The one over the edit window is still missing tone in the IPA, but as long as people have access to both, it shouldn't matter. — kwami (talk) 03:13, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Per MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition, the CharInsert gadget depends on the 'user' module. If executing the user module fails (because of incorrect syntax), then the dependency will not be fulfilled, and CharInsert will therefore not be loaded. If this behavior is not desired, you shouldn't depend on the 'user' module. Matma Rextalk12:42, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
@Matma Rex: i do not remember (and can not verify) that syntax error in personal common.js causes mediawilki.user to fail loading. actually, a 2-minutes experiment did not confirm that this behavior exists today. is this something new? peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 19:22, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
@Kwamikagami: for me, the "IPA" section under "special characters" from the toolbar has 226 different characters. are you sure it had more than that in the past? i do not use IPA characters, so i can't say it never did, but i find it highly unlikely. how many characters do *you* see under IPA in the toolbar? is it possible you missed the little scrollbar on the right? peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:45, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
Because the bottom edit window had disappeared, and a new one appeared at top, I thought it had been moved. But I was wrong: with the fix mentioned above, my browser now displayed both. The one on top has a bunch of pre-composed charater+diacritic entries, the one on bottom has tone. — kwami (talk) 23:42, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
@Kwamikagami: again, i do not know much about IPA, but the one on top has 226 symbols. the charinsert one (the one on bottom) has 163. there's a second one called "IPA English" with thirty-odd symbols, but both of these groups combined contain less symbols than the one in the top toolbar, so i'm not sure what you mean when you talk about "tone"... peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 18:42, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
The general IPA at bottom is complete. The tone letters are ˥˦˧˨˩ꜛꜜ. The English one is a subset for our conventions on WP. The one on top adds a bunch of precomposed combinations. — kwami (talk) 18:47, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
@Kwamikagami: again, i know nothing about IPA, but if i understood what you just said, the one at the top is missing some characters it would have. can you please fill in a bug report? Phabricator: can be used directly with your wikipedia account (i think), so it should be pretty straightforward. just create a new task (click "+" in top toolbar) named something like "Edit toolbar: Special characters (IPA) missing symbols", and list all the missing ones in "description". thx. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 19:37, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Wiki editing needs code colouring. Code colouring is a feature of code editing programs, such as XCode in Mac or Notepad++ in Windows, where the various elements are not displayed as black but different colours. It would be really handy, especially if the citations within ≤ref≥ were greyed as a comment as references were worst offenders in terms of legibility. (Yes, I just wanted to put my anger out there. I do not wish to join a technical steering committee, or vote argumentatively or place a counter proposal rich in WP links to push it forth… I'll go back to my science nest now) --Squidonius (talk) 20:17, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
@Squidonius: Actually, there is a gadget for that. Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets in the section "Editing" find Syntax highlighter, make syntax stand out colorfully. Then you can try out wikied (the same gadget page section "Editing" wikEd, a full-featured integrated text editor for Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome). I haven't tested them myself, but you can at least try. Maybe it will help you :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:43, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Interestingly, if you add "wiki" you get a version found on a wiki re-publish site, not this one! I think the reason is that the content is too short and redundant with the pages it links to. Google sees this as a "link-to" page and thus rates those other pages higher. But knowing for sure... ain't gonna happen. Maury Markowitz (talk) 00:31, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Are the people who aren't seeing this on Google all based in Europe, by any chance? Perhaps the article has fallen victim to a right to be forgotten request. (Although if that's the case, I have absolutely no idea what could possibly need to be forgotten from it.) — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪03:40, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm in the UK, nothing to do with EU. Get the WP article as the first result. Maybe some weird software bug at googles end, reminds me of when the search doesn't work on WP properly. [20] --Mrjulesd(talk)03:55, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Well the gws_rd=cr seems to bring up a question about whether cookies from google are acceptable, on my system (EU law inspired check), at least some of the time. While gws_rd=ssl brings up a scholarly search result.
I'm pretty sure it's a google issue. Why? Because it doesn't seem consistent, sometimes search terms such as "British Plant Gall Society" site:en.wikipedia.org work to bring up the article, but at other times they don't. It certainly seems that google search brings up sub-optimal results on occasions, the most likely explanation being some degree of bugginess.
One factor might be all this domain shifting, e.g. .dk and .co.uk and .com. Now google always checks you geographical location, as you get country specific doodles even if you change the url from .co.uk to .com. Yes many google doodles are localised, but they pretend this is not so, bringing up the same result whatever the url. So basically the url does not give the full picture of the search operation, they also employ location checking algorithms, and possibly cookie related checks etc.. So the same url in two countries may not bring up the same result even if they are identical, and that is through design. --Mrjulesd(talk)13:31, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Interestingly, having tried the link I gave above again I now see BPGS (which is a redirect) as the first result (using the same machine, still logged in to Google, but on a different IP address). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits13:56, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Formatting the escape character
Latest comment: 9 years ago14 comments5 people in discussion
What is the suggested way for displaying a escape sequence? I need to illustrate the use of VT55 codes like the string ESCape H ESCape J. I'd like to do it so it is clear that those are escapes and not the three letters ESC, without inserting any whitespace or other formatting that might confuse matters. ESCHESCJ just isn't good enough, and ESC H ESC J is potentially confusing considering that the space is a common value character in VT55 strings. Suggestions? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:30, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
The H and J are not obvious. Try EscHEscJ or with commas Esc,H,Esc,J - don't use Esc+H+Esc+J because that implies that you need to press the keys together. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:51, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
For me, the easiest way to generate anything that's not on my keyboard is by copy-paste. The downside of the first solution is that I find it very very hard to read. It's codepoint U+241B, which is in the Control Pictures block if that is any help. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 15:26, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Of course, it should be pointed out that when a DEC terminal (like a VT55) is sent an escape sequence, the "escape" that must be used is the U+001B "Escape" character itself, not a graphical representation of it. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:33, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm afraid there are no turtles all the way down, and without a clarification any representation of a control character will always be ambiguous. With the VT55 pre-dating unicode by over 15 years, I think the clarification may be omitted without any loss of understanding for the reader (but you still may want to provide reading glasses with any article where you intend to use ␛H␛J) Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 15:47, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
That was incomplete of me. I mean to say that the letter sequence in your prelast post does not say that "esc" is a single character. The "keys" do so. (Still trying to understand whether you meant that old VT55 then is better than Unicode representation). btw I think Maury Markowitz already used the answer(s). -DePiep (talk) 19:08, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Which one? I guess one can argue about semantics (what is a character?) but for most definitions, ␛ definitely is a single character. The keys template on the other hand doesn't say anything about single characters, but about keypresses. I'm not sure about the details, but for a fairly dumb terminal like the VT55, the two are likely completely interchangable. And no, I'm not saying that the old VT55 is better than Unicode representation (that would be silly), I'm saying very few would think in the context of a VT55 that when showing ␛ in an escape sequence would mean you need to enter ␛ rather than the escape character for which ␛ is a visual representation, because the VT55 predates the ␛ character in Unicode. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 19:37, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Not directly related to Oiyarbepsy's redirect issue, but I'll note that Cyberpower678 is working on getting the "login" feature working and -articleinfo may be down at various times during the day if it works at all until he is done. I suppose I'll start an internal discussion about how we let the community when there are going to be known/expected outages and how we report unexpected outages that may take awhile to fix to the community. I don't think the current way it is being dealt with is very good or appropriate <badhumor> and we need to set a much better example for the foundation to follow about communicating with communities about changes and outages </badhumor>. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)18:04, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
503 Service Unavailable
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments6 people in discussion
I just had a "503 Service Unavailable" for about 30 minutes across all Wikimedia sites, from approximately 17:20 until 17:50 UTC. Did anyone else have similar problems? And what could have been the cause for so long? Jared Preston (talk) 17:55, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
I don't know about that, but Wikipedia has been odd all morning. My Hedonil XTool at the top of articles has been there, then not there, then it redirected to WMF saying there was no internet service, then back and forth. Since then, I've been offline for a while. My clock was gone when I booted back up. After about 15 minutes, the clock reappeared. The Heconil XTool, however, very slowly redirects to a page history site at Labs, where there is nothing on the page except a blank to input an article name. Except...when I input the article and click on Submit, the article name disappears and nothing else happens. — Maile (talk) 18:12, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
By convention, we blame Steven Walling for such outages. Due to changed circumstances, I'm not particularly sure if that is still the correct response. If it isn't, I suggest we blame Ironholds. (Sillyness aside, I guess a report is forthcoming. There will probably be notification on the wikitech mailinglist of a post-mortem, and I suppose there will be something in the technology report of the next signpost) Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 18:53, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion
Just a few minutes ago, I was having trouble logging in. Whenever I tried to (on any WMF site), I got a message that said the login token was expired/invalid, or something like that. Obviously, I finally succeeded, but I'm just curious if anyone else had the same problem. --Biblioworm18:06, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
[22] does not actually show the stats when you put in a username: you put in the username and it goes back to the username selecting screen. Tried with various usernames to make sure it is not the result of a bad character or something. KonveyorBelt00:56, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Cyberpower678 has been working on getting the login feature to work. I've been unable to reach him for a status update, but will report back here as soon as I have. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)01:04, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Random "Status read failed: Connection reset by peer" errors while using the API
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I have a bot which mostly operates on Hebrew Wikisource. Recently it stopped to work because of random "connection reset by peer" errors. I checked that this error also happens when I try to use the bot in English Wikipedia. I reported the error on Phabricator but they said it probably does not belong there. Can you please tell me, where can I report this bug? --Erel Segal (talk) 06:52, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
The main concern is that VisualEditor cannot sign comments, and many pages in the Wikipedia: namespace (like this one) are discussions. This might confuse editors, especially inexperienced ones.
As a workaround, you can copy any page into your userspace, make the changes in VisualEditor, and then transfer the contents back to the correct location afterwards. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:26, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
I assume it is possible to make a blacklist of page titles which are used for discussion, and enable the Visual Editor on Wikipedia namespace pages which are not in the list (or which do not match regexes in the list, if we need to deal with subpages). Helder17:07, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hello. I often use Twinkle to rollback some edits but the last couple of months the action cannot get completed. I didn't have this issue in the past, only the last couple of months. I thought it might "go away" and gets solve by itself but the issue still exists. I don't know if I did something that caused this. Any help would be useful. In more details; when I click "OK" after I write the summary for the rollback, the action stops at:
"Grabbing data of earlier revisions: revision ....
Info: Opening user talk page edit form for user ...."
I even waited for minutes in case that it just needed more time to complete the action but nothing happens. Any idea why is this happening and how can I fix it? Thank you TeamGale(talk)16:47, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll take a look and I hope I'll get something out of it because I am not really good with technical things. If there is something simpler it is welcome. Thanks again. TeamGale(talk)21:53, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Module Citation Style 1 not accepting the 2015 format for arXiv identifiers
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Module:Citation/CS1 is borked. It's been that way for a while now. There doesn't seem to be any updates appearing in the talk pages. Can someone fix this? ReferenceBot (talk·contribs) emits error messages onto user talk pages when it encounters perfectly valid arXiv IDs in citation templates that our citation module does not recognize, which may discourage editors from contributing, since they are valid identifiers, but are not being accepted and they receive warnings for doing perfectly valid edits.
So anyone know when (if) this will be fixed? As I said before, there's been no status updates for weeks. The error has been known for over a month, and more and more material is published on arXiv all the time since the start of 2015, which will result in more and more Wikipedia articles carrying error messages, and more and more editors receiving incorrect error warnings from ReferenceBot, possibly discouraging editors from participating, as they may never understand why they are being warned, and thus just quit. This should be a serious editor retention issue. -- 70.51.200.101 (talk) 23:09, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
Praise be to FRAC
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago14 comments4 people in discussion
{{clarified}}
In short: a Move is listed in page History. Clicking its "undo" link gives an incorrect 'done' message. -DePiep (talk) 13:28, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
I tried to revert an undesired move. In the page's history, Vowel chart with audio examples, the Move shows (10:55 today) and I clicked its "undo" link. I then got an edit screen, with a red message in top: "The edit appears to have already been undone." So all fine I thought, and I left the page without saving anything. However, afterwards it appears that the Move was not undone. So the message is incorrect. I think that should be corrected. I did not try to save that edit screen (because, what would that do?). (Note: I requested the reversal at WP:RM by now, but that is not the issue). -DePiep (talk) 12:16, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Interesting. Moving a page leaves a "pseudo edit" with only an edit summary of the move. The move itself isn't recorded as an edit. The undo link attempts to undo the pseudo-edit, but not the move itself, and results in the - broken - behavior you describe, presumably because the undo option finds that the previous revision is identical to the current revision, it thinks that the edit can't be reverted, and displays the unhelpful message. To fix the problem itself; you should be able to move the page back over the redirect yourself, as long as there are no new revisions on the redirect the move created. As for the behaviour of the undo link, I'll file a bug for that. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 12:29, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Because the message text "The edit appears to have already been undone. You may have attempted to undo a page move, protection action or import action; these cannot be undone this way. Any autoconfirmed user can move the page back to its previous location, and any administrator can modify or remove protection." has no way of knowing that you are trying to undo a page move. You get exactly the same message if you try to undo a normal edit that was already undone, such as this one. Somehow, the software needs changing so that it can distinguish a move from a normal edit. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:28, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
I can understand that. Then, is it not an easier solution to make software detect such a "null record" and report accordingly? At least, that does not involve any change to the page(s) to take care of. A different bug maybe. -DePiep (talk) 19:04, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
There's nothing that we can do here. It's for the devs to fix, which means a feature request on phabricator; you could try commenting on the ticket noted above (phab:T6433). --Redrose64 (talk) 20:05, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
"There's nothing that we can do here". I knew, before. Something hope tells me some dev reads this page. I'll have to make that wikizilla account to communicate. -DePiep (talk) 22:05, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
IE 8.0.7601.17514. I must add that this started recently (today). Hasn't been there before. I have also noted that on my watchlist, it only occurs when there's an item that is not marked as visited. Could it be that something with the "bold bullet point" has been changed? It unbolds when you mark all pages visited, and then it doesn't occur again until another page on my watchlist is updated. On the other hand, it occurs every time I preview an edit. HandsomeFella (talk) 16:30, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Infoboxes not correct when using the MonoBook appearance
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments6 people in discussion
Infoboxes (and perhaps a few more things) don't show up correctly when using MonoBook as the preferred style here on Wikipedia. Infoboxes show up correctly when Vector, Modern or Cologne Blue is selected. - Takeaway (talk) 20:54, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
The infobox on Sergio Mattarella looks just fine to me when using Monobook, so I suspect that it may be your computer causing the issue. Hmm... In addition to Andy's question about browser/OS, which particular kind(s) of infoboxes are causing problems? Not all of them use the same base template. – PhilosopherLet us reason together.21:48, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
2015 0206 WP Infobox glitch Windows 7 Chrome browser Monobook When using Chrome on my laptop running Windows 7, and WP appearance set to MonoBook, infoboxes (all of them as far as I can see) show up incorrectly as in the image on the right. I have no problem seeing the infoboxes displayed correctly when I use Internet Explorer on my computer. They also show up fine with Chrome on Android devices (4.4 and 5.0). - 22:25, 6 February 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Takeaway (talk • contribs)
This may be a hangover from yesterday's outage. Your browser might have retrieved a corrupt CSS file so that not all of the styling is correct, and then cached it so that it affects all pages. Try a WP:BYPASS. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:18, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
I had just cleaned the cache a few days ago but forgot that that might help after yesterday's outage. Thank you very much! CTRL+F5 did the trick! - Takeaway (talk) 23:38, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I was checking random data about my account, and I clicked XTools editcounter. It shows strange data. It shows my first edit to be in year 2099, and total edits to be zero. I have more than 4.5k edits now. It occurred now, check sign data. EthicallyYours!10:17, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Small text at Special:BookSources
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I use MonoBook skin. If I click on an ISBN link, like ISBN 0-86067-103-8 or ISBN 1-871944-17-1 I get to the normal BookSources page - except that the menus in the top and left margins are something like 80% of normal size. I've checked zoom level (which was unlikely to be the problem, since the main text on the page is normal size), and cleared caches; I also get the same problem in Firefox, Opera and IE 8, and happens whether logged in or out. The problem only occurs in MonoBook (to view in MonoBook when logged out, visit this link); and it doesn't happen when visiting Special:BookSources directly - but if I enter a ten- or thirteen-digit number into that ISBN box (it doesn't matter whether I enter a valid ISBN or not) and click Search, the problem appears. Has anybody been altering CSS files? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:49, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
I see it too. It appears that Special:BookSources is somewhere providing unbalanced HTML which is causing <div id="column-one"> to get put outside <div id="globalWrapper">. Unfortunately the uselang=qqx trick doesn't seem to work on that page, so I can't easily see what messages might need looking at. Anomie⚔12:02, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago24 comments12 people in discussion
Category pages are now showing visible markup <a name="Pages_in_category" id="Pages_in_category"></a> immediately before the section heading 'Pages in category "..."'. This comes from MediaWiki:Category header, which hasn't changed in over eight years. Do other people see the problem? If so, it must be a recent bug in the MediaWiki software, since it wasn't doing that this morning. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:59, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
@Gadget850: There are several pages in MediaWiki space that contain HTML elements that are not whitelisted, including <a>...</a>. The markup doesn't show up (normally). --Redrose64 (talk) 23:34, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm guessing that was added for a specific gadget or JavaScript. It's from far before my time here, does anyone know why it was added exactly or what script makes use of it? I'm guessing it is used as a marker or container for such a script to add something to the page. I'm guessing it was never seen before because the script hid it or it was ignored since it is an empty link element. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)21:14, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
@Technical 13: It is valid HTML to leave the <a>...</a> element empty, provided that it has a name= attribute. This attribute (introduced right at the start) is used as the anchor for a URL that has a fragment. Since HTML 4 introduced the id= attribute, which may be applied to any element and can also serve as an anchor, the need for empty <a>...</a> elements has dropped significantly, except of course for old browsers that don't recognise anything later than HTML 3.2. The name= attribute is marked as "obsolete but conforming" in HTML5. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:34, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
I wasn't saying it was an invalid anchor or link, I was just saying that it appeared to be something that was injected as a way to find that specific spot by a script and I was wondering what snippet of code made use of that anchor. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)23:41, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Today's outage may have changed something. There was a brief period that unvisited pages were bolded in my watchlist (rather than the hard-to-see green bullet). --NE221:28, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
The real question is why was this not showing before? <a> is not whitelisted through Sanitizer.php so it should have always been exposed. We don't even have to nowiki the markup in question: <a name="Pages_in_category" id="Pages_in_category"></a>. --Gadget850talk11:51, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
Not a timing issue; some system messages simply never go through the sanytizer because they do not go through the parser. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}16:43, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
It depends on what part of MediaWiki is actually using the messages. Messages used in the user interface, like MediaWiki:Copyright, are usually not parsed, because wiki markup has no relevance outside content space. Such messages let HTML pass unobstructed. The same goes for messages used by special pages. Some people see this as a security risk (because admins can use raw HTML there). There is a bug at phab:T85864 listing those special pages. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}21:51, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Folks: The Wikipedia Library has some pretty stringent requirements for access: a 1-year old account and 1000 edits.
I want to learn many potential users we are 'losing' with this scheme. Could someone create a query that looks for the number of editors active in the last year with at least a 1 year-old account and at least:
a) 250 edits
b) 500 edits
c) 1000 edits?
This would ultimately help us get more accounts to more editors, if we can make the case that we are missing a substantial number of potentially qualified recipients! Cheers, Jake Ocaasit | c11:46, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Hi Jake. First pass - 37940 users on enwiki registered before 2014 and over 1000 edits; 60302 with over 500; 98153 with over 250. However (big caveat) not all of these are still active - the first one I checked was indefinitely blocked, and many more will have made their thousand edits and vanished by 2007. I'll try and figure out the best way to check for # of reasonably active users - has edited in the last month, say? Andrew Gray (talk) 23:35, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Hey Andrew. Thanks! Yeah, I think active in last month, or even last year would give a pretty good sense of proportion either way. So if you can do last month, awesome... cheers, Jake Ocaasit | c19:36, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
Not been having much luck with this, I'm afraid. There's a "last touched" field in the user database, which would be exactly what we need, but (presumably for privacy reasons) it's either blank or restricted to internal WMF visibility only. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:12, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Feature request: "remove redlinks from my watchlist"
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
Should be wiki. Enough of these hacks I must maintain and that bug my screen ten years after. btw Do you know how I can get rid of that 0-subs "More" tab I inherited? What is more logic that those two button-links in a wikipage? -DePiep (talk) 22:16, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
PS: The script from Krinkle get hooked on every page load?? This feature is needed only all 2 months (he is good but I saw already some strange scripts from him) → User: Perhelion12:08, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
API namespace issue / page reported existing in two namespaces
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
In AWB we are doing an API query to list pages in Category:Book-Class Wikipedia-Books articles. Something odd is happening, we are getting results indicating that pages such as Book talk:Math are in mainspace. Digging into this, we run this query (seems you won't 'continue' to the right page, but you should get the idea). In the results returned we get:
Yeah, this is definitely part of a larger problem — I've listed, at User talk:JaGa/Archive 17#New toolserver problem, 37 titles in Template:, User:, Wikipedia: or User talk: space which, despite being located in internal project spaces, are being erroneously picked up as uncategorized articles by the Untagged Uncategorized Articles toolserver — which should never be picking up anything outside of mainspace. (The WikiProject Encyclopaedia Britannica example that Cryptic raised above is one of the titles in question.) JaGa did a database search, and found that many of the affected pages do have metadata files with the datum "page_namespace: 0" (meaning mainspace) in them — although he only checked the "Wikipedia:" titles and didn't specifically check the others, this is almost certainly the explanation for the others as well. But if he looks at the metadata files that are directly attached to the pages themselves, they're coded correctly — so in other words, there appears to have been a database corruption issue of some kind, in which some pages in project namespaces somehow ended up having duplicate metadata files ghosted into mainspace for some reason. That's how a page can be "in" two namespaces at once: there are two separate metadata files for the same page, with different namespace codes in them. This certainly needs to be corrected somehow — it's interfering with critical maintenance tools, and absolutely cannot be tolerated as a permanent speedbump that users of those tools should be forced to work around — but I'm not sure how to repair the problem directly. Bearcat (talk) 21:09, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
I should add as well that the list I gave to JaGa provides one very valuable clue that may help pinpoint the problem: one of the ghost titles is User talk:108.69.192.159, a user talk page which has somehow ended up with a metadata file even though it's not just a page that got deleted, but one which has never actually existed at all. The user's sole contribution was on January 27, so whatever caused this blip most likely happened on or soon after that date. Bearcat (talk) 21:27, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
To confirm (I guess) what you are saying, the API seems convinced that both of the above pages exist, the first in namespace 0, and the second in 109: API info. Johnuniq (talk) 22:25, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion
In a template, I changed align="center" into style="text-align:center" , being deprecated HTML code. However, in mobile view the new code does not center images any more. Can someone take a look? A demo is in User:DePiep/sandbox1, /sandbox4's are open for your edits. (Warning: old wikitable infobox construct ahead). -DePiep (talk) 16:07, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Which template? Center is not that easy (as you can see on the deWP is an extra help-page for this) In De there is also an class centered, but default on Mediawiki is class="center". You can try it (it is a bit more than text-align:center). → User: Perhelion11:58, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
class="center" didn't do the trick for me elsewhere, I trust that tidy will handle align="center" before the validator sees it. –Be..anyone (talk) 22:13, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Tidy will not fix align as it is whitelisted through Sanitizer.php, thus it is still valid for Wikipedia. The center class should work, but it sets width: 100% so it will expands tables to full width which is usually not desired. See Wikipedia:HTML5#center for help. If I can get a specific example I am sure I can help. --Gadget850talk22:24, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Table at Teahouse appears broken
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
The table that is at Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive_Index appears broken to me. It stretches out way past the boundaries of the right side of the screen by maybe an extra 30% or so. Funny thing is it loads at the right size at first but then expands to mega-sized about one second later. Is anyone else getting this? I'm running Chrome on Windows 8.1 for what it's worth. DiscantX06:39, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
I can confirm what you're seeing, and it looks like a broken item is causing this. I have no idea how that archive index works, but I'll see if I can solve it. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 10:00, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello all, I'm having a bit of an issue with viewing pictures: I have a script/gadget enabled that opens pictures in a lightbox rather than MediaViewer, and until recently, I was able to close out by just clicking outside the picture. However, I'm now having to hit the back arrow and then re-searching whatever article I was at before (Splatoon, in this case). Any idea why it's now acting up? I've been consistently using the most updated version of Firefox (I've had it for a while, so no specific numbers), so it shouldn't be a browser issue. Supernerd11Firemind ^_^ Pokedex17:43, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Bits on the fritz?
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Anything in the Network tab of your browser's developer tools? Wondering if this problem happens with everything served from bits or just some parts. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 23:51, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
FWIW - not sure if its related to this or not but I'm getting reports like "... after 10 minutes or so of editing, when scrolling the original, the page rendering stops for about 10-15 seconds after each touch of the scroll bar, and I am unable to produce much work." among other "new" behaviors over on Wikisource (pretty much since the [re]deployment of 1.25wmf15 on 2/5).
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I was finishing up a Good Article review, and putting the template in to signify the successful promotion on this page. However, when I saved it, in red text was the error "Error: Invalid time." I Googled it and found the same error elsewhere. I'm using Firefox 35.0.1 on OS X 10.10.1.
Thanks,
Acalycine(talk/contribs)05:38, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago24 comments8 people in discussion
I've just blocked someone spamublock, and found the blocking reasons have been changed in order. That's no real problem, but the reason shown on the red banner of blocking (and in the drop-down list to select from) is now " ({{uw-spamublock}} <!-- Promotional username, bad faith -->) " instead of "({{spamusernameblock}}) ". Is this supposed to be an advance? These spamublocks aren't always 'bad faith' in the sense that vandalism is. They are often through ignorance and not through deliberate attack on Wikipedia. For a now example, see User:Sumtrix. and a before at User:Mkn000. Peridon (talk) 11:48, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
Soft block is for an organisational name, not for advertising, as I see it. I'm talking about the ones who genuinely haven't realised that they can't advertise here like they can on social media, or haven't realised how promotional their post was - and have an inappropriate name. This change is accusing all the spamublock ones of bad faith. Has there been a discussion on this, and if so where? Or has an intended non-displaying comment <!-- Promotional username, bad faith --> become displayed on the red banner? That looks like comment coding, but it's displaying on the banner. Peridon (talk) 12:46, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
You have a better AGFometer than me, I suppose.
I've tested the new block message; the comments appear in the block log, but not in the message that shows up when you try to edit, so I don't see how it's any worse than the template name including the word "spam". —Cryptic13:00, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
If you look in the Sumtrix link above, it's showing there - for me, at least, in Monobook and signed out in Vector. Peridon (talk) 13:57, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
I have to agree with Peridon, I don't see the additional verbiage added to the block reasons as needed or helpful, especially in the case of the spamublock template. The change should be undone until it can be discussed further.--Jezebel's Ponyobons mots17:22, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
I'd prefer a move to AN rather than MediaWiki - there'll be more participation over here and it's an en-wiki problem not an MW one. I still think the comment might not be supposed to display outside the list, and that's probably technical. Peridon (talk) 20:30, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
Well since the conversation is continuing here, I guess I'll reply here. I suggested this change on January 26 at this very village pump, now archived here. There didn't seem to be any great uproar at the idea. I took the "additional verbiage" as Ponyo describes it directly from the descriptions at WP:UTN#Blocks. For example, {{uw-spamublock}} is the appropriate message for a bad-faith promotional username block and has been since 2008 when that template was created. (Ironically, that was the template I used in my original suggestion as an example of what would be changed.) If the majority agrees that the additional verbiage is not required, that's great; I only included those to assist users that are somehow not familiar with the correct template names, so they can find the appropriate one to use. I'm happy to hear that somebody agrees that people should know the correct templates and their usage by now. --Geniac (talk) 02:48, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Addendum: I'm happy to see other users successfully choosing the updated block reasons without too much of a problem: [26], [27], [28], [29], [30] --Geniac (talk) 03:01, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
If the template were sanely named, it wouldn't need the additional verbiage. "uw-spamublock" is almost completely meaningless, like most of what WP:UW has come up with; the redirect from {{spamusernameblock}} is actually readable by humans. —Cryptic08:37, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
What the templates are named are what the templates are named. If you wish to for a change in that regard, I'd suggest proposing that at WT:UTM --Geniac (talk) 16:10, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
It's the wording appearing on the red banner that worries me, not what it says in the dropdown. Softerblock is OK for very minor promotionality, but for a full-blown ad there's only spamublock no matter whether they posted it as a deliberate attempt to flout our rules, or whether they were either under the impression that it was OK (as it is at Facebook) or thought that that was how it should be worded, being indoctrinated by PR wording seen everywhere. (An example in the UK in particular is a sign on a shop saying 'Car park to rear' because estate agents seem incapable of using the word 'at' even for things that are very immobile.) Until a revision of these classes is made (with possibly a reduction of size of spamublock), I don't thing the words 'bad faith' should be on the banner. They're fine as a comment on the dropdown because only admins see that. Peridon (talk) 12:51, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
BTW I for one of the admins who delete lots of stuff only come on this board when there's a problem. And when I do come here, I don't see the others I see frequently in CSD etc, unless they've also experienced the problem. As it's an admin thing rather than a technical thing (apart, of course, from making the change), I'd have thought AN a better place for the suggestion. Peridon (talk) 12:57, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
If I'd seen that heading here, I wouldn't have known what it was about. I also notice that only one of the two that commented was an admin. But if I had seen this, and looked in, I would have taken <-- Promotional username - Bad faith --> to be a comment line for admins to see. Peridon (talk) 13:08, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
How about this for a solution to both issues (1: users only familiar with the redirect template names and 2: the additional verbiage showing up in the block banner not just the dropdown)... the entries are changed to say something like {{uw-spamublock}} <!-- spamusernameblock -->. So issue 1 is solved; the redirect name some may be more familiar with is listed right there. And issue 2 is solved: no "bad faith" wording showing up in the block banner message. --Geniac (talk) 16:10, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
I've made some changes along those lines ([31]). I'd probably still like it a little better without the comments, or at least if the comments somehow didn't show up in the actual block log, but I don't mind it too much now. --Bongwarrior (talk) 07:29, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm also happy with the "hard block/soft block" verbiage. Everybody fine? Things are cool? Ok, time for a nice hot cup of tea. --Geniac (talk) 01:59, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
Sorry to delay teatime, but could I suggest one more small change? For {{uw-softerblock}} and {{uw-spamublock}}, can we use a more generic term like "organization name" instead of "company" because these block templates can apply to other types of organizations (for example a band, musical group, etc.) rather than just a company. -- Ed (Edgar181) 13:15, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
MediaWiki was reverted to the previous version on February 4. It was because of a performance issue. It was restored later. [33]
UploadWizard was broken on February 4 because of the revert of MediaWiki. [34]
All sites were broken for 30 minutes on February 5. It was due to a network problem. [35]
Software changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 11 (calendar).
You can have one user page for all wikis. Your Meta user page will show if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can test this tool on test wikis. [36][37][38]
You can search for media files in VisualEditor more easily. Images are bigger and you see the size and license. [39][40]
It is easier to review your changes when you save the page in VisualEditor. The window is wider. [41]
You can read the latest news about VisualEditor. You can now join weekly meetings with developers. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The first meeting is on February 11 at 20:00 (UTC).
Future changes
Administrators will soon be able to delete change tags used fewer than 5,000 times. [42]
In the future you will be able to have personal lists of articles on the mobile site. [43]
If the search results aren't "fixed" to your satisfaction (or you really want a short term workaround), specify "country = U.S.A." in the Infobox (which should really be done anyway, seeing as this is not US-specific, but I haven't done it so as to not change this search result). Mark Hurd (talk) 11:08, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Google, whose core business is web search, has some pretty nifty innovations, among which understanding that "U of A" in some contexts means University of Arkansas, and rather than treating all tokens separately additionally searches for the set phrase "University of Arkansas". It's some pretty cool stuff. Our search isn't nearly as sophisticated, and doesn't draw that same conclusion. I don't think our search will ever be as good as Googles. As an alternative, you could use google search rather than our own search. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:57, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Problem with DS alerts template
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
There's a problem with one of the discretionary-sanctions templates that I can't see how to fix. Template:Ds/alert#Codes says that gg refers to gamergate and GGTF to gender gap task force, but currently both alerts – {{subst:alert|gg}} and {{subst:alert|ggtf}} – lead to GGTF. They have different messages: the alert produced by gg is correct, but it should be called ggtf. If someone could fix this it would be very helpful. I can't see how to get to it. Sarah (SV)(talk)22:46, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago18 comments7 people in discussion
Could someone please make (or point me to it, of one exists already) a Lua module which takes a date in a variety of unambiguous formats, and outputs it in one of a few a standard formats, as selected by a switch parameter?
For example, it should accept dates in formats such as:
01 February 2014
1 Feb 2015
1 Feb. 2015
23/4/2014
23-04-2014
2014-04-23
2014-04-01 <- note, not ambiguous, as ISO compliant
1FEB2014
others tbc?
(all case insensitive, and allowing other permutations of "1" and "01", "4" and "04"); and output dates in these formats:
1 February 2015
February 1st, 2015
2015-02-01
[as three parameters, YYYY, MM and DD]
It should reject dates in the format:
01-02-2015
02-01-2015
1 Feb 15
as ambiguous, and should reject invalid dates such as:
{{#time:}} seems to accept almost all of these and output what you want.
01 February 2014 → 2014-02-01 = 1 February 2014
1 Feb 2015 → 2015-02-01
1 Feb. 2015 → 2015-02-01
23/4/2014 → Error: Invalid time. (This one fails as "Invalid time", presumably this is parsed as M/D/Y, which makes it invalid. Clearly, the format is ambiguous.)
23-04-2014 → 2014-04-23
2014-04-23 → 2014-04-23
2014-04-01 → 2014-04-01
1FEB2014 → 2014-02-01
It will, however, also accept your ambiguous and invalid examples, and try to do its best to parse them.
01-02-2015 → 2015-02-01
02-01-2015 → 2015-01-02
1 Feb 15 → 2015-02-01
29 February 2015 → 2015-03-01
31 September 2015 → 2015-10-01 (these two are really fun, heh)
I agree that it would be better to stick to it rather than create an alternative. As the one invalid "good" example you've given shows, it's really hard to do this well, and #time does an okay job. Matma Rextalk15:09, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
The extension parser function #time can silently "correct" instances of dates stated in the Julian calendar. For example, 29 February 1900 (which was observed in Greece and Russia) would be rendered as 1 March 1900. This doesn't seem like the kind of function you would want to hide under the covers for use by editors who are potentially unaware of the subtleties of calendars. I would think a function that screams bloody murder when fed a date it considers invalid would be a better choice. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:38, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Something similar has come up before, {{Cite web/auto}}, The point of that was to fix various errors in citation templates. But there was no support for it; other than the author people thought it better to have the template report problems rather than fix them silently, otherwise problems would persist for much longer. Although these aren't strictly errors I think the same applies: better to flag them and have editors fix them, checking sources for e.g. ambiguous or clearly wrong (31 September etc.) dates, rather than have software guess, possibly get it wrong, and hide the error so other editors have less chance of fixing it.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds16:22, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
I was bringing it up as something similar that has been considered, in particular for citations templates which you enquired about yourself, though it is unclear which templates this is for so how relevant. I still think the same applies; flag it as incorrect and get the editor to fix it, ideally as they preview it so before they hit save. Don't silently 'fix' it its in the correct format but the source is still non-standard.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds00:39, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
My two-penn'orth: I'd like to see {{date}} extended so that it emits date in user preference. I.e. a render-time. N.B. 'preference' to include user language, so {{date|13 feb 2015}} would give 13 fév 2015 for a French speaker, etc. -- Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Fri 08:47, wikitime= 00:47, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
I think French is a bit too far – the French WP is over there – but even within English there are different preferences, and differences between British and American practices, The problem though is this could cause problems, from the subtle to the serious, as e.g. one editor adds dates to a table or infobox, say, with one preference and it's viewed by a user with different preferences. It might just look untidy, it might be too wide and end up wrapping, making rows of the table twice as high perhaps. The second user might then fix it, but it might then look wrong, even broken, to the first or another editor who reverts or repairs it. And so on. Such disputes would be hard to resolve as different editors would be seeing different things, even with the same browser and OS.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds01:53, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
Echo notificiations
Latest comment: 9 years ago17 comments8 people in discussion
I've got a red "1" next to my name, but I don't have any new notifications. I clicked on all of the ones listed just to try to clear it but it won't go away.--v/r - TP18:04, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
@TParis: Note there may be two tabs. When you click the 1, you should see either just "Alerts" or both "Alerts" and "Messages" (the latter is used for Flow). If you see "Messages", make sure you click that to check any notifications in that tab (in the "Messages" tab, there is also an X to "Mark as read" (if visiting doesn't work for some reason) and a "Mark all as read". Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
I look at both and everything was read. No matter, though. Someone else pinged me, I got a "2", read the new one, and it cleared.--v/r - TP02:18, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
I seem to be getting selective echo "mentions" on user talk pages, perhaps 50 percent of the time, with the others disappearing into the ether. Does anyone know what's going on? Viriditas (talk) 02:22, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
Well, that would certainly explain it. A valid signature must be added with the same edit that the link to your user page is added. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:33, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thanks for helping me isolate the problem. Since there are still editors that are still not up to speed on Echo, would you be in favor of advertising the simple fact that one must sign and ping in the same edit to the wider community, possibly through a sitewide watchlist message or banner notice? Viriditas (talk) 02:52, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
The requirement to sign on the same post as the user link is already described, at WP:Echo, also {{replyto}} (other places too). I can't force people to read documentation.
Question: should we expect our users to read documentation on every feature? Or should we make them more intuitive with some kind of error checking? Viriditas (talk) 10:32, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
The first one possibly failed because it has {{ping|User:Viriditas}} instead of {{ping|Viriditas}}. The second one possibly failed because a subheading was added. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:25, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
The font size of the header of {{Copyviocore}} has suddenly got much bigger (which is fine by me), but a weird </font-size> tag has sprung up at the same time. There's nothing in the history of the template to explain the change; indeed, it shows up in historic versions too. Can anyone explain? Fix? Many thanks, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 23:45, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Yesterday amongst other corrections to pages with ref errors, I made one to Browser hijacking. Today my notebook is unusable, as things keep popping up in MSIE, Firefox and Opera. Is it just coincidence, or is there some secret stuff hidden there? It could be coincidence, because yesterday I also ran the weekly Windows update. (W7). Also, that notebook is falling to pieces, literally, so anything could be going on. But worth checking just the same. -- Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Fri 08:53, wikitime= 00:53, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
Looking through the source editing window, I don't see anything out of the ordinary. I'm not aware of any way to hide stuff within a Wikipedia page, but I'm no expert, so take that as you will. Supernerd11Firemind ^_^ Pokedex02:30, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
I know a few weeks ago I was correcting a software page, and it was just XML, nothing else. But when I saved, there was a 'nothing-changed' report and it didn't show up on my contributions list, so I can't even tell you what it was. And if your machine doesn't work tomorrow @Supernerd11: you'll know why! -- Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Fri 13:52, wikitime= 05:52, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
A long shot but could your browser be trying to look ahead and cache pages that are e.g. linked from ones you visit? I'm not going to look for myself but Browser hijacking might have links that lead to, well, browser hijacking; deliberately (unlikely) or to sites which link to them, or even to sites about browser hijacking which have been tempting targets for hackers (especially given how ELs can suffer serious link rot). My first guess though was coincidence, possibly something picked up somewhere else, possibly Windows needing a rebuild or reinstall.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds06:28, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
The Amazing Spider-Man (2012 film) vandalism
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Wikipedia pages getting hung up pretty frequently lately
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion
I've been getting the following message pretty frequently on Wikipedia pages in the last week or so:
A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue.
Happens probably every 5th page I load, more or less. No other site besides WP. I'm 95% clueless on how all this works. From this message, is this enough info to tell if this is a problem on my end, or on WP's end? Is this something in my .js or .css file, which I can remove? Or do I have to live with it because it's not under my control?
I haven't changed my .js or .css files in months, and haven't (intentionally) changed or upgraded browsers in the last month or so. --Floquenbeam (talk) 16:45, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Me too, but I get the problem on lots of web pages; rarely Wikipedia. Newspaper websites are worst. It mostly seems to happen when I have lots of applications running, a slow connection and am trying to load a web page that is heavy on scripts or video content. It appears to trigger if the page fails to complete inside 60 seconds. Usually, if it's an advert I Stop script, but when waiting for text I Continue.
You can try turning off the userscripts you are using to try to determine if one of those is causing the issue (you can find them on User:Floquenbeam/common.js and User:Floquenbeam/monobook.js (that is assuming you use monobook, which seems to be the case). If you remove them all, and turn them back on one by one, and the problem starts when you activate one, that's your issue. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 20:31, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I've been gettig this recently (Firefox 35.0.1) not just on WP but I've found just clicking "stop script" seems to leave the page properly displayed. Thincat (talk) 17:47, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks all. For me, it's only happening on WP, but I don't frequent other sites with a lot of scripts (well, that I know of). I get the page served up eventually, I'm just annoyed at the 30 second wait until I get the error message, when everything locks up and I can't do anything. I've followed Martijn's advice; if this solved the problem, I'll slowly add them back. Thanks again. --Floquenbeam (talk) 16:32, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
Reminder: Weekly VisualEditor triage meeting tomorrow at 20:00 UTC (12:00 PST)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
As a reminder, on Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC) there will be the first of a weekly series of open triage meetings about VisualEditor.
We will discuss the release criteria for VisualEditor, and jointly prioritise the work of the team, talking about the bugs and features which are most important to you. We particularly welcome the presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code.
The joining instructions are available on MediaWiki.org. Hope to see many of you there.
@Martijn Hoekstra: We're not recording the calls, no; however, I'm about to write-up the outcomes with an e-mail to wikitech-l which I can link to from here. Next week's meeting (at 08:00 PST == 16:00 UTC) will have a slot where people can nominate things to be de-listed, and new and re-nominations will be considered in the main session as this time. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:51, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
signature
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Why I can not sign correctly? does anybody know? M.Sakhaie 11:29, 14 February 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by M.Sakhaie (talk • contribs)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The tool at http://tools.wmflabs.org/bibleversefinder, mantained by a veteran editor, has been down for almost (or "at least"?) five months now. That editor's talk page has three comments on it (including mine, a few days ago) from other users. What to do in that case? I would like to edit one page which uses that tool, but don't want to seem rude about it. I wrote the third note on the veteran editor's talk page. The other two notes were written by two other different editors, within months of each other. In wikipedia-editing time (if there is such a thing), is it the right time to do something about it? I'm not quite offering myself to mantaining it...but perhaps would like to know what it might entail to maintain a lab tool (I'm new to the registered Wikipedia "world," but not to editing articles). -- Capikiw (talk) 22:37, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
I don't know whether this is the right spot for this but.
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Some pages refuse to let me post. Right now I am trying to edit [[47]] and here. I press save edit and nothing happens. Please help. I am using a phone and chrome browser Wikipedia. Not an app. I have no idea what is triggering this. It might have something to do with references but I've posted at least 5 references before without an issue. Thanks. Don't forget to ping me. -DangerousJXD (talk) 01:11, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
OK then. Turns out the reference I was trying to post was not done properly or something. To fix it I went to the reference itself again and copied it again and redid the reference. Before I fixed it, I tried a few things, one of them was switching to desktop mode. When I clicked save in desktop mode, I got an error message instead of it just hanging there. The error said that the reference was wrong or something. So to sum it up, I did the reference wrong. -DangerousJXD (talk) 20:54, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
Is this old AfC submission a suitable article?
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Dear tech people: I posted a notice at the Internet Wikiproject about this some time ago, but received to reply, so I thought perhaps editors here would be familiar with this kind of thing. The draft article Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Echo (Cloud Services) has quite a few references, but I can't tell if this is a notable topic. It's eligible for db-g13 deletion now. I'm willing to fix it up if it's notable, but if not this would be a good time for it to disappear. Any opinions? —Anne Delong (talk) 17:44, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Notability is established by the sources. TechTarget seems good and the author of the sourced article seems credible enough in his own right; DiscussIT Blog is, well, a blog (plus the link 404's); bub.licio.us seems okay, but not sure about that one; TechCrunch has been discussed over at WikiProject Video Games multiple times before, where opinions are very split, but sound like it's generally unreliable; ReadWrite Web is a little iffy (It would depend on a way to establish the author's notability, of which only the second one has anything written about them, and that doesn't really establish credibility); Backplane Exchange is a first-party site; and Synaptic Web sounds like a wiki. This leaves us with one good reference, nine possibly good ones split between two sites, and three no-no's. I couldn't find much of anything else on a ref hunt. Depending on how other editors look at TechCrunch and ReadWrite Web, whether to delete this or not could go either way. Supernerd11Firemind ^_^ Pokedex23:22, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
Thank you very much, Supernerd11, for the detailed analysis. Your explanations will help me the next time I am trying to evaluate an online product. GoingBatty has started improving this one, so it's no longer eligible for db-g13 deletion. Since it's on the edge, it may as well stay in Draft for now, and see what press it may garner over the next while. —Anne Delong (talk) 12:23, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
WP:RFED and editprotected talk pages
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I have opened a new section at WT:MOS for continued development of new dash guidelines, as 16 July approaches and we need plenary discussion with fuller participation. See also a summary of the action up till now, in the section that precedes that one ("Dash guidelines: toward a conclusion").
to
I have opened a new section at WT:MOS for continued development of new dash guidelines, as 16 July approaches and we need plenary discussion with fuller participation. See also a summary of the action up till now, in the section that precedes that one ("Dash guidelines: toward a conclusion").
Reason: links to two archive pages, to facilitate following the trail of archived discussions. Thanks, Wbm1058 (talk) 23:12, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Done. For future reference, WP:RFPP has a section for this (shortcut WP:RFED), "Current requests for edits to a protected page". Nyttend (talk) 07:25, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I figured that there was such a place, but Wikipedia:Edit requests, the obvious page to look for it, was a dead end for me. I just updated Wikipedia:Edit requests § General considerations to more broadly discuss the purpose of WP:RFED. It would also be helpful if the magic behind the blue "submit an edit request" button were made intelligent enough to detect pages which are protected beyond the editors' privilege level and automatically redirect them to WP:RFED rather than open up an edit window that the editor can't edit. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:20, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
Is there a way to resolve this situation? Can we set up the "submit an edit request" button so that it automatically goes to WP:RFED when the protected page is a talk page? Nyttend (talk) 19:57, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
No. I had to update my AdBlock filters on c: d: de: m: and mw:, but not here. Either my old filters still work only here or the central notice didn't show up here for Monobook users. –Be..anyone (talk) 01:53, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Page load not completing.
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
It is taking a very long time to load any page. I'm not certain whether this is my end or Wikipedia's, but I notice the when I look at the load on Firebug, every page is sitting there trying to load WikEd_error.png, apparently for ever. (Firefox 35.0 on Fedora 20). --ColinFine (talk) 00:13, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Possible problem with Navigation Popup gadget
I have this gadget enabled just about always, because it often avoids having to open another tab when you just want to clarify the meaning of a word/phrase that is linked to a wikipedia article.
Today I was looking at the Percent-encoding article. When I moused over the Uniform Resource Locator link in the first paragraph, the text presented in the popup confused me, so I opened the article and sure enough it was presented differently to the information in the popup, so that the meaning of the article itself was clear.
To illustrate the difference, the text below is a direct copy of the wiki markup from the first paragraph of the uniform resource locator article (except that I have removed the references along with their enclosing ref tags, because they otherwise appear at the end of this note), so you should see it exactly as it is presented on the wikipedia page (but without the blue superscript links "[1]" and "[2]"):
A uniform resource locator (abbreviated URL; also known as a web address, particularly when used with HTTP) is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to a resource. Most web browsers display the URL of a web page above the page in an address bar. A typical URL might look like:
A uniform resource locator (abbreviated URL; also known as a web address, particularly when used with HTTP) is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to a resource. Most web browsers display the URL of a web page above the page in an address bar. A typical URL might look like: RFC 3986 (2005) classifies URLs as a specific type of uniform resource identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably.
The text immediately above is copied directly from the popup using pointer dragging. Here's how it looks (except for emboldening and blue text colour for links) as displayed in the popup:
A uniform resource locator (abbreviated URL; also known as a web address, particularly when used with HTTP) is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to a resource. Most web browsers display the URL of a web page above the page in an address bar. A typical URL might look like: [//www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt RFC 3986 (2005)] classifies URLs as a specific type of uniform resource identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably.
As you should be able to see by comparing the immediately preceding paragraph with the first quote above (from the actual article), the popup processor seems to have a problem with rendering the quoted URL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) between <code> </code> tags - nothing appears in the popup for this markup. It then fails to render the following square bracket enclosed URL, [//www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt RFC 3986 (2005)], as a link and conflates the two sentences into one - which is a tad confusing.
(If you have the navigation popup gadget enabled, try mousing over this Uniform Resource Locator link to see if you get the same result.)
Firefox 33.0.2 on Windows 7 does the same, at least until I opened the edit window, in which case there's no sign of any url in it. (Looking at the history, it appears to have been edited out between when I came across this thread and opened the edit box). Supernerd11Firemind ^_^ Pokedex17:10, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Software changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 18 (calendar).
You can now change the order of categories in VisualEditor using drag-and-drop. [51]
In VisualEditor, you now need to make a change before you can "Apply Changes" to citations and templates. [52]
The way the cursor moves in VisualEditor is changing. Your browser now handles the cursor directly. Most of you will see no change. In right-to-left text, the cursor now moves in a 'visible' rather than 'logical' way. This is like other sites but you may be surprised at first. [53]
Meetings
The VisualEditor Team had their first public bug triage meeting on February 11. They will post the results on the meeting page. [54]
You can join the second weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 18 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join. [55]
You can join a meeting with the developers of the Content Translation tool. It will be on February 18 at 13:00 (UTC). [56]
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Is it possible, on Windows Phone, to save Wikipedia articles so that they can be read offline (e.g. when no network connectivity is available)? With Wikipedia on PC an article can be saved as a .pdf file and read using Adobe Reader; such files are perfectly rendered by the Adobe Reader app on the phone but, being formatted for the "big screen", the text is much too small to read. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gareaves (talk • contribs) 22:58, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
It's fixed now. The category list at the bottom of a page is updated by a purge but the listing under "Pages in category" on the category page requires a null edit to update. PrimeHunter (talk) 05:00, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
SPI form
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I don't know whether this is the right Help Desk for this query. I am having great difficulty filling in an SPI form. I have had no trouble before but that time I only had two sock-puppets to report. I have 18 IP sock-puppets this time and the sock-puppeteer to report and have prepared the evidence. I have followed the instructions at WP:SPI but nothing works. I have tried different methods. I think it is the list of IPs that is causing the problem. I have tried entering the numbers as the form indicates with |ip1=[number] etc, and then with * {{checkip|1=[number]}}, but neither works. The list keeps duplicating or does not appear at all, the username of the sock-puppeteer does not show, and sometimes the evidence appears in the wrong place. These are the raw details I am trying to enter (ignoring any code there, of course.). I user IE11 and Windows 8.1. Can you help, please? ~ P-123 (talk) 11:20, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Well, currently we use whym's Whois tool which is still experimental and fails to display AfriNIC queries in the template. So, I prefer that we use an external source like domaintools which is way more reliable and informative. But as, Technical 13 (talk·contribs) has said, I need to establish consensus for the edit-protected request to get approved. Write Aye and Nay depending on your opinion and put forth your reason accordingly. --QEDK ♠ T ♥ C16:17, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Automatically substituting Template:Unsigned and friends
Latest comment: 9 years ago31 comments20 people in discussion
Would anyone object to automatic substitution of Template:Unsigned and other similar signature templates? There are almost 30,000 transclusions of them, so it would be better to make sure there is a consensus to do it before letting a bot loose on them. Please see the discussion at Template talk:Unsigned and the corresponding edit request here. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪02:47, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I object. This request not only assumes bad faith on the part of an editor who may have simply forgot or been unable to sign ( the ~ isn't available on all mobile devices and copy and past if you have edittools or charinsert isn't always easy ) it is also a change to the content of a discussion that isn't visibly apparent in the rendering and fails COSMETICBOT. I've commented as such and closed the edit request until there is a consensus which should've been obtained first. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)03:21, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
How does it assume bad faith? The templates are already there, so I don't see how substituting them makes any kind of statement about the editors who made the posts. ekips3905:59, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
I thought there was a consensus for this. I put a whole bunch of unsigned templates on a talk page, then tried to get bots to archive, and Clubot refused to archive the transcluded unsigned templates (thus, this is a real problem and not just cosmetic). When I posted about it at the bot's talk page, I was told that the bots behavior is intentional since the unsigned template should always be substituted, and the user then went the the talk page and substituted them all. So, to fix this, I put it in this bot's category, but the bot doesn't do it if there's over 100 transclusions. Unsigned has over 20,000, so it would be way too much work for a human. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 03:20, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
Does anyone know the rationale for (a) us wanting all these occurrences to be substituted, (b) the bot not wanting to perform too many substitutions at once? Is the latter due to fear of temporarily overloading the system, though the end result is still desirable? EdJohnston (talk) 04:25, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm not aware of any special rationale for (a), although with this kind of template the reason for substing is usually to make sure that users are guaranteed to see the message as it was originally sent. (If the message is not substed, and someone changes the template after the message is sent, it could look completely different to what the sender intended.) As for (b), this is to prevent vandals from maliciously substing templates with thousands of transclusions, as reverting all the edits would take a disproportionate amount of time and effort. The edits themselves don't put much strain on the system; they are (I think) done at the rate of 6-10 a minute, a similar rate to other bots. This means that while the system load wouldn't be very high, a run of 30,000 substitutions would take a few days to complete. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪06:31, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
As far as (a) goes, I assume this to be the dating; a transcluded template containing the current date will always contain the (now) current time (it doesn't, off course, because of bugs/reasons, but it does after an action=purge), while the substituted template will have the time of substitution. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 13:16, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
It's a pretty minor issue either way. But I would be perfectly willing to restart this task, should circumstances permit. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 18:34, 4 February 2015 (UTC).
Sounds like we need an answer to the basic question here. I see three options:
Substitute All unsigned templates should be substituted. Bots should substitute any transcluded versions, so these templates need to be added to Anomiebot's list.
Transclude All unsigned templates should be transcluded. Archiving bots will needs to be updated to ensure they can read a transcluded unsigned template
Who cares? It doesn't matter. We still would need to change the archive bots, though.
Substitute, SineBot substitute them, Anomie's unsigned script substitute them, and there is no difference on substituting and transcluding. I don't think making archivebots to read {{Unsigned}} is good idea. — Revi04:38, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Substitute, no point in transcluding as autosigs never need updating. Transcluding only adds to transclusion depth thus slows down rendering, especially on archived talk pages. (also fixed wrong word.) -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}12:13, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Transcludeat least for 7 days beforesubstituting. Immediate substituting implies bad faith on the part of the OP and they should have a chance to go back and remove the template adding their own three tilde signature. Good faith new users may see the template being substituted as a permanent red mark on their editing. This is different than how sinebot does it because sinebot leaves a notice on the user's talk page explaining the situation and teaching the user how to fix the situation. Alternatively this is another case of the perennial Wikipedia talk:Signatures#Automatically sign talk posts which has been rejected by the community multiple times. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)14:20, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Technical, I'm just not buying the bad faith argument. If there is an element of bad faith, it's not in the bot that substitutes the template, but in the human user that places it in the first place (since our signing bots substitute it). And having one bot transclude it and another bot substitute 7 days later seem entirely ridiculous to me. Now, on the other hand, if you want the signing bot to wait before signing, that addresses your argument, but we're not talking about signing posts, we're talking about modifying posts already signed. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:30, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
If you're really worried about making the editor unhappy, then I think the more important point would be to change the bot signature to say something like <!-- auto signed --> [[User:Example|Regular signature goes here]] rather than the current display, which says Ha, ha! User:Example doesn't know how to sign comments!. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:22, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
Substitute. I don't see any need to include a delay as suggested immediately above; for one bot actions aren't instant, except for those bots reversing vandalism. Mostly it should be substituted when first added anyway. Getting a bot to do it gives the OP more time to correct it. Not that they can't easily correct the final substituted version, by editing the HTML or undoing (e.g.) AnomieBot's action before replacing the template.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds14:40, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
It's a lot harder for new users to figure out how to replace substituted HTML then a template. I've seen it done and it has resulted in half the page being left with an open <small> tag but no close which breaks half the page. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)15:03, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Then someone will fix it. Saying something should not be changed because a subsequent edit might break things is a recipe for making no changes at all, or at least no changes that introduce relatively complex HTML/Wikicode. So no adding CSS to tables for example.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds15:25, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Substitute: the exception being if parameters are left out because whoever added it hasn't bothered to look up the timestamp or whatnot (like {{Unsigned-unk}}; these should all be added to a hidden category if they aren't already). Would be simpler for bot design and debugging, and should lower server-load. Temporary transclusion for a fixed time before this isn't a bad idea though, and wouldn't be a problem for archive-bots or server-load. ‑‑xensyriaT15:33, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Substitute — I don't feel there's a truly compelling reason to transclude at this point. The template is unlikely to ever be significantly changed (and really hasn't been, historically), doesn't need to blend in with generalized UI changes, and doesn't need to dynamically add or remove categories (or update text based on dynamic conditions). On top of all of this, every bot, script, and tool that makes use of it would need to then account for the new format as well as the old, plus enforcing transclusion (i.e., transforming a substitution into a transclusion) in an automated way is a giant pain in the ass inevitably fraught with bugs. :P Overall, seems to be an unnecessary hassle for more people than it's hypothetically—and I'm not sure how, hypothetically—it's supposed to help in any significant way. --slakr\ talk /04:25, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Substitute: no legitimate reason to change the signature after signing; reduces server load and prevents any future tampering. BethNaught (talk) 11:41, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
Exactly, it prevents tampering in a way that suggests to new editors that they are not allowed fix it to what their actual signature is and in doing so assumes bad faith that editors are all of a sudden intentionally not posting their signature and fully automated signatures for all posts need to be done to prevent increased disruption to the encyclopedia. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)11:49, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
You know very well that I meant it prevented tampering with the template as opposed to the signature. If a new editor knows how to sign, I would have thought they would know how to resign. The template is not about assuming bad faith, it's about being helpful when people accidentally forget. I really can't understand why anyone would take offence at a bot signing when they had forgotten. Your deduction that editors are all of a sudden intentionally not posting their signature and fully automated signatures for all posts need to be done to prevent increased disruption to the encyclopedia simply doesn't logically follow. Also, my name is not Beth. BethNaught (talk) 11:54, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
There should be no need to change the archive bots, to my understanding. But if the result of this discussion is to substitute them, we should set up a lua module to remove left-to-right marks in order to address this. →Σσς. (Sigma)02:59, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Substitute In general, templates used in talk page discussions should be subst:ed whenever possible to avoid a future change to the template changing archived discussions. I don't see any compelling reason to transclude, and subst:ing isn't assuming bad faith. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 18:46, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
nbsp
Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments7 people in discussion
Presumably by "from HTML" you mean the entity. Why do you describe this as the "bad version"? There is nothing wrong with it; it is recognised by every browser (except possibly some from 20+ years ago); and indeed, that entity is at the core of {{nbsp}}, so if was in some way "bad", then disguising it in a template must be just as bad, if not worse.
Anyway, {{nbsp}} exists because it was created and hasn't (yet) been taken to TFD. The original documentation said "template to minimize code used for multiple consecutive non-breaking spaces", which sounds like a primary reason that it was created. The template still does that - given a parameter (and used in carefully supervised conditions), it can reduce the amount of wiki markup - if you want four non-breaking spaces, you can use {{nbsp|4}} instead of . But used without a parameter, it is pointless, much less efficient than the entity, and breaks certain bots, scripts and templates (such as the citation templates). --Redrose64 (talk) 09:16, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, the HTML version is what I call the bad version. I can remember to open and close with a pair of curly braces, but I can't remember the format of the HTML version. It is easy for the editor to get wrong and if there is no space between it and the text to the sides, it makes reading the text difficult for the editor. And it is not pointless without a parameter - it makes it easier for the editors to edit and not make mistakes. Bubba73You talkin' to me?00:36, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
For consistent spacing, where some browsers make adjustments with multiple regular spaces. (Sorry, don't recall specfic instances.) Or for indenting the first line of a paragraph. If the "&xxx;" format is too hard then that is a problem with all html entities, not just this one. Not something that is likely to get "fixed". ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:30, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
This is the craziest template I've ever seen on all Wikipedias. I can't believe that there are so much Interwiki-links. I can not imagine any real useful case for the template⁉ PS: If more than one space is needed, for example "padleft:" can do the same, white-space:nowrap is here completely useless (Lua here is fully overdone). Anyway this is also an hack against wiki-syntax. → User: Perhelion11:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
It is certainly true that {{Nbsp}} is wiki-markup, and is HTML. It is also true that, in general, we discourage raw HTML, as we don't want our editors to have to learn HTML. It is not true that all bots and scripts understand . The span could well be removed from the template. I would not support a task to convert from one form to the other, though I would not oppose the change being done when other edits were being done. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 11:35, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
Is anybody bothered that readership stats for Wiki are haywire ?
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
The outside measurement of usage stats are pretty well maintained.[1][2] The switchover to the new toolserver may also be a factor in following the stats. Aside from looking at comScore, etc, do you follow the new toolserver? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 13:48, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
This is generally thought to be (mainly) because of Google putting the first chunk of the Wikipedia article on their pages. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 12:06, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
Regular expression matching first sentence of an article?
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I need a regular expression with which to extract the first sentence of any article from its wikitext, ignoring and removing all reference citations, templates, and images. Please help. EllenCT (talk) 16:01, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
This is not really a job for rock solid regular expressions. For example "Stanley was an explorer who met, in Africa, Dr. Livingstone. Later they had a picnic." Now the way I type it you can see the end of the sentence is a "." followed by two " ", but if you are just looking for ". " you will break it after "...Dr."
That aside you could get a pretty good chance of having the first sentence if you use something like
([^\[\]\{\} ]?[^\[\]\{\}']*|)'''[^'#*'''][^\.]*\.
You should then repeatedly remove the stuff you don't want:
s/<ref>[^<]*</ref>/g
s/{{[^}]*}}/g
s/[[\s*(File|Image)\s*:[^\]]*]]/gi
(Alternatively, and probably better, remove the cruft from the page first, then look at the first sentence as simply [^\.]*\.)
Note that this will leave sentences like "The Taj Mahal at over high, is the world's tallest building." because the units are in a {{Convert}} template.
HTH. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 12:53, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
What is the context? I could craft a regex that would have a good chance of working in one hit. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 13:04, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
Echo is not working
Latest comment: 9 years ago14 comments7 people in discussion
Echo notifications are not working or only working sporadically. It's happening all over the place in the last three days. In all the cases I've seen, the formatting was correct and the comment was signed at the same time the user-to-be-pinged's name was linked. It still doesn't work. Voceditenore (talk) 17:45, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, echo is really not working as expressed at Kudpung's talk page. @Redrose64: As echo is not working then how is it possible that your ping to Quiddity will work? JimCarter14:33, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
I don't think so. A week ago everything was fine, it is very unreasonable that there is a problem in my preferences when I haven't changed anything. JimCarter15:28, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
@Voceditenore and Jim Carter:: The developers have been investigating various reports for the last few weeks. (See phab:T78424, and linked blockers). They've been changing the signature-recognition code to account for various edge-cases. Please link me to any (recent) specific diffs, that should've but didn't, trigger an echo notification, so that I can add them to the list of fresh examples. (Jim, I've already tracked down the two at kudpung's page which you refer to. It looks like the #top in his signature might be the problem, which they're already working on. Thanks :) --Quiddity (WMF)(talk)20:01, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Here are two pings to me which did not generate a notification. The user has #top in their signature. 13 February 2015 + 17 February 2015. Please ask for some feedback to be added to the tool ("2 notifications sent" like "your edit was saved") because even when glitches like #top are fixed, people are going to edit a notification in their post and will never know that their edit failed. Johnuniq (talk) 08:15, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
In the "Message from Eddielawrocks" thread on my talk page, there two pings that didn't work. I pinged MelanieN, and she only saw it when monitoring my talk page, and George8211 also pinged Melanie in that thread, but as he didn't sign his post, that might upset the ping. I've got a niggling feeling that that has an effect, but I definitely signed my post. There again, as both these involve @MelanieN:, and she has found others not getting through, there could be a problem there. Peridon (talk) 12:22, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
I am finding it to be intermittent. As Peridon said, I did not receive this ping: [57]. The other ping he mentions failed because the user did not sign his post. There were a couple of other failures in recent days, where the edit WAS signed but I did not get the ping; sorry, I can't find them right now, because (obviously) they are not in my Alerts log. However, multiple pings today have worked, including the one in this thread. --MelanieN (talk) 12:44, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
@Johnuniq: The task for creating a popup-feedback message about # of mentions sent, is phab:T68078 (with a few details there about the difficulties to do with preference-privacy and the optional opt-out settings, making it impossible for us to be told exactly who was successfully "mentioned").
@Peridon:, yup, we have to sign the post in the same edit as the mentions, and a few other requirements described at mw:Manual:Echo#Technical_details; this is to avoid false-positives when refactoring, manual archiving, etc.
@Voceditenore: I did get your ping here. That second example you linked would not have worked, because "The diff hunk must be recognised as an addition of new content, not a change to existing content." per above link.
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
I generally use Google Chrome Version 40.0.2214.111 (64-bit) on a 2 year old MacBook Pro.
I'm working on a project to include photos for every entry on List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, which has 2562 municipalities plus a dozen or 2 entries for places in 2 counties. My major concern is whether a 2600 entry table can be read and edited and saved. The table is very simple in its structure with almost no links or templates. It does sort very quickly.
I've worked with large tables for a long time with WP:NRHP but a few years ago a large table was considered to be 300 entries, which we'd then split up.
So far the table is easily edited (I'm half-way thru adding the pics), but for entries numbered over 2100 I have to wait just a second before typing "|100px]]" after copying in the photo's name - no big deal. Saving is also easy and may have gotten better since November. I'm wondering how well editing will go if I add links to the municipalities, or a template for coords.
There also is a style question here. Can a table so large be used by readers? It probably can't be browsed usefully in the way most tables are, but with sorting and or Cntl-F searching it works great for me. Loading is also no problem for me, but I'm wondering how well it might work for other readers, especially on mobile.
I agree that when the table is fully populated it may pose some burdens, but I'll leave it to others to determine whether those burdens are two much. I have fairly fast access, and note that when I just tried to edit it, I had some problems.
One suggestion is to group the municipalities by county and have a separate table for each county.
As a second suggestion you might look at List_of_current_NCAA_Division_I_women's_basketball_coaches. It is a table with 351 entries. However, if you choose to edit any entry, instead of editing the whole table, you edit one conference. I didn't set it up, someone helped me with the setup, but it makes it much faster to edit an individual entry, while preserving the single table view. You could do it by county, but have the county breakdown invisible to the reader; only the editors would see it.--S Philbrick(Talk)17:34, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm loathe to break up the list, partially because there are multiple lists already, e.g. one for cities and boroughs, another for townships, another for CDPs, another for unincorporated settlements. This list is the largest one and allows comparisons between types. My purpose in using this one is that so much (including the photos) gets to be seen together in an orderly way.
The coaches list is very impressive, but I'm wondering if all the templates would prevent that list from getting up to 2600 rows? My experience suggests that a lot of templates slows things down, but I don't know for sure. What slows uploading and sorting the most? I'd guess templates, then photos, then ordinary links, but I don't know. So far - half way through the list, photos don't seem to be slowing it down at all! Perhaps there is some new technology that I haven't been aware of, or maybe, just over the course of 3-4 years everything speeds up beyond recognition? Smallbones(smalltalk)19:42, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
This page was at the time, the largest table on Wikipedia. It seemed to function with no problems. Saving was not instant. There were, however, another several hundred references to be added. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 14:02, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
Thats an interesting list no matter how you look at it! I don't really have to add any refs (maybe one for everything), but would like to link directly to each municipality, and maybe even adding a coord template 2600 times. So far I've just assumed that the coords will be beyond reach. Smallbones(smalltalk)19:42, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
MediaViewer "broken"?
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments6 people in discussion
I am very puzzled, and it is driving me crazy... On today's main page, the image of Jafar Panafi does not trigger the media viewer. I can find nothing different from any of the other images that work just fine. What magic is preventing the MV to trigger on that particular image??? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}10:07, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
That makes sense. Still, it does come across as 'broken'. I think MV could be smart enough to open the non-cropped version if the image links to another image (and partially matches the filename). -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}14:26, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
(ec)No, please don't! MV's primarily failure IMO was that when it wasn't sure of what to show, it tried to show the best it could, which resulted in doing the wrong thing in some cases. When in doubt, MV should fall back to just giving up, rather than trying to make an intelligent guess of what should happen. Sure, if it can be made to recognize this case with full certainty, it could be handled, but when in doubt, bail and fall back to known good behavior. That's exactly what's happening here, and exactly what should happen. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 14:31, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
A serious flaw of that method is that you need to specify both ends of the link - the page you're linking from as well as the one that you're linking to. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:45, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
You need to specify the image to open and the page on top of which it should be opened. The page containing the link does not need to be specified. If you want to use the current page, you can always just use {{FULLPAGENAME}}. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 23:44, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
In general, activating Meda Viewer on an image with |link= would be a bad idea. Such images are explicitly meant to take the user somewhere else, and are most often used on icons and logos and such. When someone clicks on such an image, seeing it enlarged is the last thing they want.
no space to add text to edit summary- due to Tamil characters used within a username?
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
I noticed something odd when I went to revert an edit [58]. I expected to be able to leave a comment about my edit in the edit summary box but could not do so initially. In this instance the default addition of text to the edit summary box meant the box was already full, with the result being that none of the characters that I was trying to type would appear in the edit box. Strangely there didn't seem to be a long text string displayed on-screen (which I might expect to see if the edit summary box was full of text characters).
The user who had left the edit I was trying to revert was User:தென்காசி_சுப்பிரமணியன் Their name was displayed as Tenkasi Subramanian when they wrote on my user page but it looked as though it was only the Tamil characters that were shown in the edit box summary. This editor had been upset that I had not left an explanation of my actions. I went back and made a similar reversion [59], and this time was able to leave a small amount of text in the edit summary field, but only after deleting some of the pre-filled text.
Could this to do with how MediaWiki deals with Tamil letters, characters and unicode? Is this a known issue? Drchriswilliams (talk) 22:11, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
It appears that you're hitting the 255 byte limit in the edit summary because of the UTF-8 characters (See Help:Edit summary#The 250 character limit). The edit summary automatically places [[User:தென்காசி சுப்பிரமணியன்|தென்காசி சுப்பிரமணியன்]] in the box which is 138 bytes on it's own, but only 54 characters. If you then add on the link to their talk as ([[User talk:தென்காசி சுப்பிரமணியன்|talk]]) (85 bytes/43 characters) then you're up to 223 bytes before any spacing or message. Nanonic (talk) 23:24, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, the number of bytes in the username was the problem. You can simply delete part or all of the prefilled edit summary so you get room for your own. You could for example reduce it to "Undid revision by தென்காசி சுப்பிரமணியன்". PrimeHunter (talk) 00:21, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Is there a logical reason that you cannot see the references when you are previewing a page you are editing? It would save a lot of effort if you could access them at the same time as your edit, rather than having to save, go back in, hope that the correction fixes the problem, save, go back in, fix another problem, etc. I don't know if I am explaining this phenomena well, but when you preview an edit, the references do not show, thus if there are errors, you have to go back into edit and try to remember what the error was to fix it. If it showed in the preview, as the article does, one could make corrections and preview before saving. SusunW (talk) 05:38, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
It is and thanks. We'll see if the solution will "alleviate the inconvenience and mild irritation" or create its own havoc when one must remember to remove it. ;) SusunW (talk) 13:06, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
@Edgars2007: I'll try it. Working on a "gateway piece" with lots of sourcing and it is "muy frustrante" to type an entire section only to have 3 or 4 sources come up with errors. Could we also possibly clarify why I can put a title of a "Chapter" in a citebook but not a title of an "article" in a citejournal? Seems to me that journals are more likely to have separate articles by different authors than books are likely to have separate chapters written by separate authors. *sigh* Mind you I am not complaining, just trying to understand the logic. Totally appreciate the help! SusunW (talk) 20:31, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
@Edgars2007: I am dancing with joy. That other little dohicky worked like a charm! Gave me a heads up on a bad ISBN in one reference and a date on another. You are my hero. Cannot use title. If title is the name of the journal, it is not allowed to use it again for the article. Or at least not that I can figure out. Say for example you have a journal called Chronicles of Oklahoma, that has an article in it called "Slick's Bar-B-Que" you can not cite both. I finally figured out that I could just manually type over citejournal to make it citebook and it will allow me to have a title and an article. But that truly makes no sense to me. If you want to see a history of where this happened and what I tried you can look here User:SusunW/Sandbox 2SusunW (talk) 21:00, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
I'll give it a go again, but I filled in the fields that come up on the template. When you save it, you then get a "chapter" error and then have to figure it out what combination will work. Seems to me that if you input Author and author's article, there should not be a conflict, but every time I have entered that, there is a problem, unless I change citejournal to citebook. SusunW (talk) 21:49, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
If it's a book, use {{cite book}}. If it's a periodical (other than a newspaper), use {{cite journal}}. If it's a newspaper, use {{cite news}}.
{{cite book}} recognises |title= for the name of the book, and |chapter= for the chapter within the book. Periodicals don't have chapters, they have articles.
I don't see anything above where you state which article you're working on. If we know that, we can look at the references that you've done so far, and fix them where necessary. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:15, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: the two that it happened on so far are what is currently #20 Cassidy, Laurie M. and #31 Gökay, Bülent. To clarify, there is no field in the template that says chapter, but that is the error message that appears. The box I completed was author's article. SusunW (talk) 23:09, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Don't worry about it @Redrose64:. I am sure it will happen again and I won't spend time trying to fix it. I'll just let you know. That way you can see the error, which will make it much easier to solve. SusunW (talk) 23:47, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
To get back on topic: the references can be seen at the section level if you add {{reflist}} at the bottom of the text. But then you have to also remove it. Why can't the edit box, in addition to [Save page] and [Show preview], also have a [Show preview w/ reflist] option that would do that automatically for the preview? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:43, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
It's released under {{PD-self}}, so assuming that permission is correct, the best answer would be for the file to be moved from he-wiki to Commons and then it could be used anywhere. Nthep (talk) 09:40, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago12 comments6 people in discussion
When a user puts pairs of = signs around their templated request for unblocking (yes, some of them do...). the only way of editing the request is via the whole page edit button, as the section edit buttons won't give access to the request, displaying nothing after the first pair of = signs - in the edit window (the page displays perfectly in normal view). The last case I've seen (out of quite a lot - WHY do they do it?) was at User talk:Infomatrixinc. Once the = signs are removed, the bottom of the page goes back to normal. Is there a purpose in this, or is it just one of those things that no-one's bothered to report before? Peridon (talk) 13:26, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Permalink. How bizarre; I've never seen this before. This has to be a bug: I've never before seen a situation in which a section edit link is prevented from appearing by anything except the no-edit-section magic word. Nyttend (talk) 13:31, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
The template breaks the line so you don't get a valid section heading == ... == on the same line. That means The first == just becomes rendered before the template and the last == after the template. The whole thing should become an addition to the previous section and can be edited by editing that. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:38, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Permalinks never have section edit links so it cannot be tested on Nyttend's Permalink. If you did try editing the previous section and the edit box stopped the text too soon then I guess the section edit software doesn't discover that the following heading is broken. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:43, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Hm, I'd forgotten that; thank you. However, PrimeHunter and Redrose64, see my talk page; I added the unblock template from Infomatrixinc's talk page (changing the username and the rationale, but not the formatting), and that revision is the latest to my talk page. It still doesn't have the edit-section link in the unblock section, even though the links are present in other sections. Nyttend (talk) 13:54, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
It behaves as my second post indicated. The page rendering software expands the template which breaks the section heading syntax so the unblock "section" is not actually a section but becomes part of the previous section, like my below example "This is not a section heading" where I manually added newlines to break the heading. The section editing software for the previous section apparently stops at the next source line of form == ... == without discovering whether the ... part breaks the section heading. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:31, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
There isn't any place, really. At the moment, there's no process for someone getting access to/taking over a tool run by an inactive user, short of getting the source code and setting up a fork. Mr.Z-man20:39, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
But can't I report to some WMF technical stuff about some problem, so it can be fixed? For some reasons I don't want to reveal which is the tool (yes, I know, it is kind of stange etc., but we all Wikipedians are somehow strange :) ), but if I can send e-mail to somebody, then I would be glad to do that :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:49, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure Δ was the best person to report it to, although I respect his technical ability. Please see the RfC mentioned above on meta and wikiviewstats has been migrated into xtools if that was the tool you are talking about and once the above RfC is closed, I plan on requesting being added to bibleversefinder (or maybe even sooner). — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)02:01, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
Spurious vandalism warnings
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Resolved
Hi everyone,
It seems that User:BTP51 has been receiving vandalism warnings for edits he hasn't made, but he's using a home IP address (background information here). Is there any advice we can give him, or anything that can be done on our end? Thanks, Sunrise(talk)08:30, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion
Can someone just confirm something for me please. If I want the apihighlimits user right, are the only ways of getting it to become a Bureaucrat, an Administrator or to get a Bot account? Because, to be honest, I don't want to be a Bureaucrat or an Administrator, and I can't see the point in creating a bot account that is only going to be used to read data and never edit. I just want to continue to Gnome away in the background with AWB, a task that is becoming harder due to the the growing size of Wikipedia and the 25,000 article limit in AWB. - X201 (talk) 11:46, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Add researcher to the list of things I don't want to be as well :-) Looks like applying for a pointless Bot is my only route forward. - X201 (talk) 12:19, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Cool: I was going to suggest a "Gnome" group with that right... because I too ran into that problem today, with Category:Living people. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 20:54, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
I personally think this right should be added to the existing Template editor group or as part of a new admin-tech/interface-editor/sysop group that would be the next level of of TE. I look forward to someone making that proposal in a productive manner that will get community support. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)01:58, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
@Ruslik0 and This, that and the other: Thanks for pointing out the Global possibility, I didn't realise that was another way of attacking this.
I agree with @Technical 13:and @Rich Farmbrough: in that we need the ability for this user right to be handed out through other methods. Under the current arrangements, obtaining this user right feels like the Month Python Spam sketch, you've got to become an Admin and have delete, undelete, block, unblock, protected move, user right granting and removal and bulk vandalism removal, regardless of whether you want them or not. Looking at the archive of PumpTech, a new group has been mooted several times before but never really got off the ground. I can't see any reason why the right can't be added to a new "Gnome" group, or an existing technically orientated group like Template Editors, but I suppose someone will have an objection of some sort. - X201 (talk) 15:48, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
CatScan
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi there from fr, I want to know if someone know what happen with this tool, particularly the "Suggest articles from interwikis" option ? It didn't work for me, showing the message "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)ERROR: No result returned." Thank you ! --Simon Villeneuve (talk) 11:40, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I vaguely remember I once saw a tool which could compare the articles and pages two different users have edited, giving a breakdown of where they coincide. Anyone know what I'm referring to? --Dweller (talk) 17:13, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Greetings,
After a delay in updates to the Structured data on Commons project, I wanted to catch you up with what has been going on over the past three months. In short: The project is on hold, but that doesn't mean nothing is happening.
The meeting in Berlin in October provided the engineering teams with a lot to start on. Unfortunately the Structured Data on Commons project was put on hold not too long after this meeting. Development of the actual Structured data system for Commons will not begin until more resources can be allocated to it.
The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany have been working to improve the Wikidata query process on the back-end. This is designed to be a production-grade replacement of WikidataQuery integrated with search. The full project is described at Mediawiki.org.This will benefit the structured data project greatly since developing a high-level search for Commons is a desired goal of this project.
The Wikidata development team is working on the arbitrary access feature. Currently it's only possible to access items that are connected to the current page. So for example on Vincent van Gogh you can access the statements on Q5582, but you can't access these statements on c:Category:Vincent van Gogh or c:Creator:Vincent van Gogh. With arbitrary access enabled on Commons we no longer have this limitation. This opens up the possibility to use Wikidata data on Creator, Institution, Authority control and other templates instead of duplicating the data (what we do now). This will greatly enhance the usefulness of Wikidata for Commons.
To use the full potential of arbitrary access the Commons community needs to reimplement several templates in LUA. In LUA it's possible to use the local fields and fallback to Wikidata if it's not locally available. Help with this conversion is greatly appreciated. The different tasks are tracked in phabricator, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89594 .
Volunteers are continuing to add data about artworks to Wikidata. Sometimes an institution website is used and sometimes data is being transfered from Commons to Wikidata. Wikidata now has almost 35.000 items about paintings. This is done as part of the WikiProject sum of all paintings. This helps us to learn how to model and refine metadata about artworks. Experience that will of course be very useful for Commons too.
Additionally, the metadata cleanup drive continues to produce results. The drive, which is intended to identify files missing {{information}} or the like structured data fields and to add such fields when absent, has reduced the number of files missing information by almost 100,000 on Commons. You can help by looking for files with similarly-formatted description pages, and listing them at Commons:Bots/Work requests so that a bot can add the {{information}} template on them.
At the Amsterdam Hackathon in November 2014, a couple of different models were developed about how artwork can be viewed on the web using structured data from Wikidata. You can browse two examples here and here. These examples can give you an idea of the kind of data that file pages have the potential to display on-wiki in the future.
The Structured Data project is a long-term one, and the volunteers and staff will continue working together to provide the structure and support in the back-end toward front-end development. There are still many things to do to help advance the project, and I hope to have more news for you in the near future. Contact me any time with questions, comments, concerns.
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I have TOC turned off (I find it breaks up the article). When I read an article with FORCETOC, I see a line of whitespace. Is this the right place to report this? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:13, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Why am I constantly being asked to log in to Wikipedia, even though I check "Keep me logged in"? I use Internet Explorer 11. Wahrmund (talk) 16:33, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
A very non-expert suggestion: Have you got IE set to delete your history at the end of a session? If you have, it'll delete the cookie that enables your log-in. I use 'delete history' on Firefox, and I keep cookies form a small number of sites, but bin all others. (I also have third party cookies banned, which cuts down on the junk.) Peridon (talk) 12:26, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
Improve the canned edit summary tag filter
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
Currently (see [61]) the "canned edit summary" tag is only to be triggered by:
"Fixed grammar"
"Added links"
"Fixed typo"
A check in Special:AbuseFilter/633 (I swear I wasn't able to see the abuse filter before ) shows that those are the only summaries that work. The tag needs to be improved to cover summaries like:
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Searching user list
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Help! I just created an article for "Apawamis Club". However, the name of the article seems to be "Apawamic Club" instead due to a typo. How do I change that? Can someone help me please. --EditorExtraordinaire (talk) 20:35, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict)I've moved it for you. Although you're newer, you've been around long enough and have enough edits that you should be autoconfirmed, which means that when you are looking at a page there should be a button next to history that says "More" and has a down arrow. Click on that and there's one that says, "Move". Click on that and fill in the new title and the reason for the move and click the submit button and it should move the page.
Also, I took a look at the page, and you need more sources for that article. Currently all you cite is the club history on the club's website. Given what else you say in the article, (the fact that it's over 100 years old and has hosted several major tournaments) you should be able to find some more reliable, independent sources. The article needs to cite those before someone comes along and tries to delete it. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving20:50, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago16 comments3 people in discussion
Hello all,
I've spent basically today building this really complicated template and it's really close to done. A manually programmed mockup is at User:Resident Mario/Voter/Results while a template version is at User:Resident Mario/Voter/Results/core. I ran through the entire setup procedure and hit a wall at the final step which goes like follows:
If you go to User:Resident Mario/Voter/Test Poll/No, edit it, and insert a ~ in place of a - in the comment opener it will reveal the hidden counter on the page, which is functioning as expected—returning the number of votes on the page.
However when this template is transclusized to another page it mysteriously instead returns meaningless variable input that seems to change every once in a while and is mysteriously the same for both values:
If {{PAGESIZE:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|R}} is on page A and you transclude A on page B then {{FULLPAGENAME}} returns B, in this case Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 134. So the number is based on the size of this page in both cases. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:16, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Thanks for the prompt reply; any way you know of that solves this issue? Looking into it now (so refreshing to know what's broke, for once). ResMar02:20, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Clarification: I see the problem is in the interface between {{PAGESIZE:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|R}} and {{{{{transclude| :{{{option_one_vote_collection_page}}} }}}}}. Would a naive solution, then be to subtract the current page's FULLPAGESIZE from the total? But there's a division operation in between and, well, there goes another half hour...ResMar02:27, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Why do you want the name of the template page? Is there something wrong with {{PAGESIZE:{{{option_one_vote_collection_page}}}|R}} and {{PAGESIZE:{{{option_two_vote_collection_page}}}|R}}? You could allow a default option with subpages called /Yes and /No with this: {{PAGESIZE:{{{option_one_vote_collection_page|[[/Yes]]}}}|R}} and {{PAGESIZE:{{{option_two_vote_collection_page|[[/No]]}}}|R}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:33, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
If you make defaults then /Support and /Oppose may fit more cases, or it could be something generic like "/Option 1" and "/Option 2". PrimeHunter (talk) 02:43, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm keeping that open ended because I implement an optional third polling option later on. I started using that configuration, which I wasn't even previously aware of, because {{{{{A}}}}} laughed at me and hurt my feelings. I'll try substituting your construction now. ResMar02:47, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
You can use something like {{{{{A}}}}}, but you need to insert spaces for it to work properly, otherwise the parser doesn't know whether you mean a template name taken from a parameter, or a parameter name taken from a template call. For the former, use {{ {{{A}}} }}, and for the latter, use {{{ {{A}} }}}. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪02:57, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
@Mr. Stradivarius:{{ {{{option_one_vote_collection_page|User:Resident Mario/Voter/Test Poll/Yes}}} }} has the same problem that my current implementation does, the topic of this question. I'm frankly not sure the whole thing is salvageable, actually. It's very frustrating because I got the mockup working in an hour or so and this has taken me an entire day and I'm not out of the woods yet ,at all... ResMar03:04, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
It would be easy to get the wrong vote count using PAGESIZE, for example if someone changed the formatting of the vote page like I just did here (without thinking about how it would affect the calculations). Or if someone added a comment with their vote. Instead, how about using a preload to insert a pre-designated string, and then using a simple Lua module to count the number of times those strings occur on the page? Users would still be able to break the vote count by removing the string, or by adding extra unique strings, but at least it would be harder to break accidentally. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪03:10, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Do you know Lua, and would you be willing to help me out here, then? I know nothing of the capacities of the new template plugins but from my experience with scripting languages it would be a trivial problem, yes. Frankly I just didn't expect this to take so much time to get roadblocked: if it wasn't for the weird glitch that Prime has pointed out in this really borderline case I'd be done, now (and if he hadn't, well I doubt I'd have figured it out myself!). As efficient use of time goes learning to use Lua and Lua templates might have been, uh, smarter. ResMar03:16, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Well, I've gone ahead and created a simple string counting module at Module:User:Mr. Stradivarius/String count. For example, to count the number of times the string "admin" appears in the source wikitext of ANI, you would use {{#invoke:User:Mr. Stradivarius/String count|count|page=Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents|search=admin}} (result: 49). If this looks like a good approach, then I can fix it up so that input errors etc. are caught, and put it in the template. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪03:52, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
A scripting engine was created for maintainability, ease of writing logic, and performance. Lua specifically was chosen for its sandboxing capabilities. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 22:35, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
There sure is a whole lot of mailinglist stuff about it. There is [62] which is one of the oldest documents about it I guess. I'm not 100% sure if there was an RFC, but the general sentiment was one of thank god. An RFC wasn't really needed either, as nothing was really changing, just additional options were provided. People started using it naturally, and there wasn't much, if any, opposition. Mediawiki templates are really not suitable for programming, and something like Scribunto, which is the name of the Lua extension was sorely needed. You could ask Tim Starling or Anome, who both worked on the implementation, they surely remember if there were any en.wiki discussions about the implementation. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 23:35, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
While I don't particularly recall an RfC as such, there were quite a few discussions. I'd try checking out the archives of he various Village Pumps or the discussion pages for the particular template(s) that you are interested in. – PhilosopherLet us reason together.23:51, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
Lua has made some templates far more efficient, and made it possible for others to do things that were impossible or impractical, before. However, it has also made it harder for many editors to understand how templates work, or to change them. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits21:10, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
I imagine there are some editors who actually prefer parser functions, either through long exposure to it or because its syntax seems simpler somehow (and it arguably is, but that simplicity means doing anything non-trivial with it is far more complex). But I can't think there are many. Lua is so much better in almost every single way: apart from the above it's far easier to work with, with proper syntax colouring, syntax checking and easier conceptually with a clear separation between code (the Module namespace) and everything else - no more ugly linebreaking comments because the parser code in a template is also its output.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds23:07, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Please explain how to obtain a list of recognised parameters from a Lua-ised template. With a normal template, I search for triple opening braces; anything from that point to the next pipe or triple closing brace is the name of a valid parameter. For example, the template code might be
- of these, the first is the null parameter which is a "special" (almost always found, as here, preceding a parser function or template name in the form {{{|safesubst:}}}); there are three named parameters |name=|reason=|date= and one positional parameter. Now, how do I do that with a Lua-ised template? Sometimes, they're helpful, as with {{str rep}} which we know recognises three positional parameters - but it might take more than three, and it might also take named parameters. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:23, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
I think there was (at least) once such question at VPT, which resulted in answer, that there is no 100% sure way of doing that. But maybe I'm wrong or things has changed. Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 23:40, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
I don’t think 'make it easier to find function parameters by looking at source code' should be a design principal of any programming language. It may be easier for some editors in some cases (though I suspect not generally even for them: see e.g. this version of {{Dynkin}} before its Luafication) but all parameters available for use should be fully documented in the {{documentation}}, and editors should refer to that. You could easily make a mistake, using parameters wrongly, not recognising dependencies, using parameters meant only for testing or replaced by newer parameters and left in for compatibility but not meant to be used.
This to me seems an argument for properly documenting all templates and modules meant to be used by editors other than their creator. There seems to be no requirement at the moment; understandably editors are focussed on getting templates finished, working, with bugs squashed. Documentation often seems to lag behind, only fixed when someone notices perhaps weeks later that it no longer matches the template. In a few cases templates go without documentation for weeks, months or years. {{Dynkin}} was one that only got documentation as I converted it to Lua; it had none for the previous three+ years.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds23:37, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
It absolutely should be, it is important for internationalisation. When you have a simple language like template-speak a suitable parser can be crafted in a couple of lines, for Lua its a different ball game. One cannot rely on every template author to exhaustively document and understand nuances, this is why languages have thrown away flexibility (un-forced locking, multiple inheritance, type looseness, uninitialised variables, memory reuse, etc.). Indeed Lua was dragged kicking and screaming out of the Foundation, and was probably not the best solution. Also it has lead to compulsive re-writing of templates to "be more efficient" which it often is, but not always, since many programmers are taught how to program, but not taught any computer science. Certainly we have abandoned a lot of readability, which is a cardinal sin. It is much like the obsession with every jot and tittle having a CSS class, which is actually implemented in every skin in every browser as "default text, default size". All the best: RichFarmbrough, 11:23, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
Template documentation is not kept up to date, although it certainly should be. If I see from a diff that a template has been amended in such a way that a triple opening brace has been added, I know that either a new parameter has been added, or an existing param has been given greater functionality. Similarly for when a triple opening brace is removed. Either way, I know that the documentation should be checked and updated where necessary. But if the template is in Lua, how do I know that a parameter has been added, amended or removed? What are the simple tell-tale signs (equivalent to the triple opening brace) that I can look for? Until and unless there is a mandatory requirement that templates not be amended without the documentation also being amended, there needs to be a way for people to spot and correct any discrepancy between template and documentation.
I agree with Rich: there are people on a drive to rewrite templates in Lua, not because it should be done, but because it can be done. In so doing, something is always overlooked, unexpected behaviour is added, previous expected behaviour suddenly fails to operate as it should. Also, the number of people capable of sorting out these (and future) problems is greatly reduced. See WT:WSS#How long has this been broken? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:02, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Parser functions are simpler, yes, so there is really only one way to handle parameters. But this is one of their worst features. Simple tasks like taking a number/date, converting it to a standard format such as an integer, then using that throughout the template are impossible. You either do it in-place every time it's used in a parser function or you impose stringent conditions on input, so a task that would take a single line of [Lua] code becomes an obligation on every editor using the template/a source of numerous errors when the wrong format is used. More generally Parser functions' simplicity make doing even simple things very hard, and makes doing even mildly complex things (such as those requiring simple loops - all those templates with hard coded limits on the number of parameters as each parameter has to be handled individually) impossible. It is an appalling language for programming and is long overdue replacement.
I also dispute the number of people capable of sorting out these problems is reduced. It's greatly expanded because we are now using a proper programming language, one that many programmers use, or if they don't that they can quickly pick it up as it has much in common with other modern programming languages. It may take time for existing editors to become as proficient and for new editors with appropriate skills to join but it should be quicker and easier for most than learning parser functions.
We could do better at updating templates though. Apart from requiring all templates be properly documented, proper use of each template's sandbox (and module sandbox) and testcases would catch at least some problems. Where this isn't enough or practical (not every template can be tested on a template subpage) perhaps have a process of code review, where other editors look over the code changes in the sandbox. This is common in industry and has other benefits besides helping ensure correctness.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds01:26, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
If Lua was used to encapsulate stuff that is hard in template language, we would have broken the main roadblock, which was the functions that were either horrendous or impossible in template language, and which the developers refused to supply as parser functions (although they were written and tested). Certainly looping and recursion are useful, but they were denied from the original langu age for performance reasons (as was "if", and Tim even said he regretted permitting that (actually "qif") on one occasion) - recursion could be reintroduced trivially.
Moreover template language is actually wiki-markup, there's nothing special about it. Therefore anyone who can write articles can write templates. Templates that have simple arguments require a little more knowledge, but not much.
As for the lack of variables in templates, other Mediawiki wikis have created a syntax that allows them.
All the best: RichFarmbrough, 20:37, 22 February 2015 (UTC).
AnomieBOT
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
That would require a rather major change to MediaWiki in how the "bot" flag on a revision gets stored, and then another change to how the "current" revision gets flagged that might prove prohibitive from a database performance standpoint. Anomie⚔13:29, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
I was aware that the problem is with MediaWiki, not with the bot, which is why I brought discussion here so as to gauge the level of support for this idea. The database load depends on the desired depth of the feature. I'd be happy with a depth of 1.
Brief discussion of development details
If so, I see two ways this could be implemented. The first would be to fetch the last and last-1 revision metadata rows, and see if the last-1 contributor is the selected AND the last contributor is an ignore-listed acct. The second would be to only fetch revision metadata for the last-1 revision where the selected is not the last contributor. I suspect the first implementation will be more efficient for most use cases, but it depends on the distribution of user behaviours. The difference is probably small. Based on the latency I observe as a user, I suspect that fetching revision lists is one of the less db intensive tasks we currently have, and therefore even doubling the load exerted by that task will have a negligible effect on overall performance.
Allowing people to set up custom ignore lists has potential benefits beyond ignoring actions by trusted bots. Samsara18:32, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
(There used to be a gadget which helped with the watch-list problem.) If this was built in (and wasn't just "all bots") there would need to be a preferences page for each user to list their "ignored-for-purposes-of-calculating-current list". I also doubt that there would be much impact on performance, especially if it was not a default option. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 20:45, 22 February 2015 (UTC).
Strange page name linked in alerts
Latest comment: 9 years ago14 comments3 people in discussion
It's from MediaWiki:Echo-no-title. If it's believed to only occur for deleted pages then I suggest we change it to say "[Deleted page]". The page name would be nice to have but if it's not available then "[Deleted page]" at least indicates the problem while "[No page]" sounds like a bug or unknown feature. PrimeHunter (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 22:10, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
It reveals the user who linked it but nothing directly about the page. You can however guess the pagename from User talk:HM Tamim7, even without access to deleted edits. The link in Hmtsoft was in {{Infobox dot-com company| ... | programming_language = [[C++]], [[PHP]] (as [[HipHop Virtual Machine|HHVM]]) ...}}. Should we code MediaWiki:Notification-page-linked to display the username when the pagename is unavailable due to deletion? PrimeHunter (talk) 01:07, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
I'd say that displaying more of the available information can only be beneficial. So yes, I'd vote for both "[Deleted page]" instead of "[No page]", and for displaying the username. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:30, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
I agree, but would prefer more input before changing a default interface message. phab:T52829 is from July 2013 with no recent activity so there is no telling when or if the pagename becomes available. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:45, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Moreover, it would be even better to have something like "HipHop Virtual Machine was linked from a page that was later deleted", of course if that would be doable, instead of having a "[Deleted page]" that confusingly links nowhere. The username could be also added, for example with something like "HipHop Virtual Machine was linked from a now deleted page that was created by Hmtsoft". Just as a wording suggestion. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:31, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Prime Hunter's version if it gives the actual deleted page, Dsimic's if that is not available. Even then "HipHop Virtual Machine was linked by HM Tamim7, from a now deleted page" is better, because we don't want to imply HM Tarim7 deleted the page. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 20:16, 22 February 2015 (UTC).
The page $ already exists and cannot be overwritten
Latest comment: 9 years ago13 comments7 people in discussion
Edokter, thanks for the link! I created it by adding a second sentence and a pair of <big> tags to the Mediawiki page. This didn't work, however: the additional sentence displayed, of course, but when moving User:Salvidrim!/sandboxorig to User:Salvidrim!/sandboxtest and checking the "move talk page" box, I got <big><big>The page User talk:Salvidrim!/sandboxtest already exists and cannot be automatically overwritten. You must resolve the situation manually if you want to complete this pagemove.</big></big> I didn't realise that tags like <big></big> would display as text when used in a Mediawiki tag, rather than working. Any ideas on what to do? I was going to delete my version of MediaWiki:movepage-page-exists, but I suppose I ought to leave it up in case anyone else wants to try something, but feel free to request deletion at any point if you think that there's no more testing to be done. Nyttend (talk) 23:09, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
No all system messages are going through the sanitizer/parser to process HTML and wiki markup, so it is treated raw. Not much one can do here in terms of styling this message. I've deleted it. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}23:29, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
I'll think about doing so once WikiMedia stops allowing me to use <center>...which'll never happen (ae. cruft is cruft is cruft and chalk it up to the age of the website). ResMar01:43, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
You are wrong, there are no parser conversions for obsolete elements or attributes at the moment (this change was reverted in 2012). Center is probably also a obsolete tag that the parser will never substitute. The reason is that it's effects are dependent on it's parents, which makes it difficult for the parser to replace it correctly. Instead, like bgcolor on tables, it will work for as long as browsers choose to support it and then simply stop working. I believe we recently got reports from the first browsers dropping support for some obsolete attributes, so that might be reason to re assess changes to the parser (I think Edokter actually was considering taking another look at that). Any change will likely first start with adding tracking categories or something similar, giving editors a way to assist and observe changes. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:35, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
On the <table>...</table><tr>...</tr><th>...</th><td>...</td> elements, the bgcolor= attribute was never a full part of the HTML spec. It was first described in HTML 4, but was marked as deprecated even then, hence browser vendors were never obliged to provide it; it is known that some browsers do not support this attribute, which is why we have bots going around altering them to style="background-color: ...". The <big>...</big> and <center>...</center> elements are different, in that both were part of the formal spec - both were added in HTML 3.2; center was marked as deprecated in HTML 4.01, but big was not; both are obsolete in HTML 5. If an element - or an element's attributes - were part of the formal spec for HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2 or HTML 4.01, browser vendors of the time will have included support for those elements or attributes (otherwise they wouldn't have been compliant), and since nobody is obliged to rewrite web pages to accord with the latest spec, there will be a lot of web pages out there which are pure HTML 3.2, so browser vendors are unlikely to drop support at any time soon. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:19, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
If all system messages are treated as raw, what about the big involved ones with lots of links and other stuff, like MediaWiki:Blockiptext? What if we added its use of NOTOC/NOEDITSECTION and turned the warning into a section header? Nyttend (talk) 02:53, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Won't work. Not all system messages are treated raw; it depends on what part of the software or extension is actually using the messages. Phabricator is your best chance. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}09:24, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Unclosed div in Template:Start tab
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
At the end of Template:Start tab there's an unclosed <div style="padding: 1ex"> tag, and it's causing the sections on this page not to collapse on mobile view. (Compare this page with, e.g., ANI in mobile view.) This unclosed div has been there for a long time, so I think something in the mobile skin must have changed recently. There might be a bug report in that, if someone wants to look. On the premise that unclosed divs are usually bad news I tested what would happen if I removed it, but the result is that the tabs don't display properly. Can anyone see how to balance the tags while still getting everything to display correctly? — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪12:37, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
Dear editors: I have been looking at some of the statistics about Wikipedia, and I find graphs about the number of edits, the number of articles, the number of active editors, etc. Is there also a graph that shows the growth over time of the combined size (maybe in gigabytes) of all articles? (not talk pages, etc.) This, to me, would be the best overall indicator of Wikipedia's growth, rather than the number of articles, since more articles created means more articles to be enlarged and updated.—Anne Delong (talk) 14:22, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 25. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 26 (calendar).
It is now easier to see template fields in VisualEditor. The fields are bigger. [67]
It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [68]
Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [69]
Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [70]
Meetings
You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 26 at 00:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
At the moment you need to log in to edit Wikimedia wikis on mobile devices. You can say if anyone should be allowed to edit on the mobile sites. The discussion ends on March 15.
Images in the interface will soon work better in Opera 12. [71]
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I am not able to edit my user page using my android mobile browser (Google Chrome).
This error starts appearing from 2 days.
The edit source icon in mobile version of wikipedia(A Pencil Logo), get merged to the notification icon on the top right corner of the page . I can give a screenshot of this. I am not able to understanding the kind of error happening to it, even though when I opening wikipedia on PC, it's all right.
Please anyone solve this problem.
Mobile Browser: Google Chrome 38.0.1847(Android) < br/>
Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Saurabh_Chatterjee_2Saurabh Chatterjee 2 (talk) 17:03, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Saurabh Chatterjee 2 (talk • contribs) 16:58, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion
Example of what I mean
Lorum ipsum
dolor sit
consectetur
adipiscing
Donec sed
dolor maximus
maximus justo
blandit ipsum
Praesent eu
sollicitudin metus
vel eleifend
Sed et lorem
quis erat
tempor viverra
sed id augue
Phasellus lacus
imperdiet sed
tempor eget
dolor molestie
Sed sollicitudin
condimentum
sapien arcu
sodales nibh
id ultrices ex
...and
...so
...forth...
I asked over at the help desk, but I haven't gotten much of a response—thought I'd try here. Basically, I was wondering if it's possible to use the CSS parameter nth-child() (as explained here: [72]) in tables to ease the coding of background colors or text features at a steady interval? Currently, I'd have to code |- style="background:#C0C0C0;" on every other row, even though I only want a gray background color on the even-numbered rows. Were I designing a table in a webpage, I could use nth-child() to set up this style from the beginning. Additionally, the parameter allows the designer to set up whatever intervals s/he wishes and to begin the intervals after a certain number of columns or rows. This would be greatly beneficial in extremely long tables where reading clarity is paramount. I think alternating row colors help the reader stay on course through detailed and lengthy data points. Is this possible? -- Veggies (talk) 04:48, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
I may well just add the following line of CSS (from the previous discussions, adding white stripes), just to give editors the option. We'll see how popular it gets. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}17:51, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Fwiw... we started the needed polling for facilitating the development of "something" along the same lines as mentioned above over on Wikisource more than a month ago. You can check out both the nth test-bed & the findings to date (even participate) starting HERE. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:36, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Edit API error
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I have a script at User:Dudemanfellabra/NRISOnly.js that controls my bot, User:NationalRegisterBot. I run it ~weekly and it scours the lists on WP:NRHPPROGRESS to produce this list of all pages in the project, along with a bunch of other information that it dumps in various places. It takes about 3 hours for each run, and I've tried to run it twice today, both times failing at the very end when it tries to dump the information by editing subpages of the above-linked page. Since it takes so long to run, I haven't had time to poke around to figure out what's wrong with it. I haven't changed the code since the last bot run a week ago, so I'm wondering if anything has changed in the API since then? Is anyone else having problems? The editing is done through an AJAX call as follows:
See, that's the problem. I don't have the code set up to show me the error (dumb mistake on my part). It just says it encountered an error. (Side note: If I wanted to output the API error, how would I do so?) But it's never encountered one before, and like I said, it ran fine last week, so something has had to change somewhere besides the code. I was hoping someone with knowledge of a recent change would chime in, but it seems no one knows of anything. I'll look into it more if I can.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 06:59, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Download as PDF failing
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
This was reported on the HelpDesk. The download as PDF feature is failing on the Madoff investment scandal article, but works OK on other articles. The eror message is "Status: Rendering process died with non zero code: 1". any ideas? - X201 (talk) 14:46, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Apparently caused by statement [[File:CAHIERS NO 6.pdf|alt=WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORT|thumb]] (recursive PDF?) --Boson (talk) 18:15, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
PS: The first German one under phab:T74002 also appears to be caused by an embedded file, the statement being the German equivalent of [[File:EU financial transaction tax.svg|thumb|bla bla]]]] (can be reproduced using that statement).--Boson (talk) 18:37, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
The only thing "odd" I can report about opening that history page was the re-appearance of the cite-banner announcing Steward Elections when I know I "dismissed it" already right around the time of the issue/changes concerning the Hide Fundraising gadget a couple of days ago. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:46, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Searching, dates, and bots
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
When you do a search on Wikipedia, under the search is a green date indicating when the page was last modified. This is a useful tool when searching discussion pages, as it enables you to search within a time frame. Unfortunately, bot edits update the last edited date, making it harder to brows by discussion date. Is there any way to make it so that bot edits do not trigger an update to the last edited date in search results? – PhilosopherLet us reason together.01:19, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago33 comments17 people in discussion
Both January 27 and February 4 only show partial data for pageviews. Both dates compiled only articles up to some point in the alphabet between Royce White and Tim Hardaway, Jr.. All articles after this point in the alphabet have no pageview data for these dates. Recall that December 31, 2013 stopped between TNZ and TO and was not compiled completely for several months thereafter.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 21:31, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
It appears that the program follows the alphabet not only in the articles but also in the Wikipedias it serves. According to this posting the Arab Wikipedia's Page view statistics are still working while the English Wikipedia's are not. Ottawahitech (talk) 14:37, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Is the source data from Wikimedia complete? It's best to narrow down the offender. It'd be nice if the Foundation could follow through and actually make their own page view statistics in a readable format rather than relying on a website that frequently breaks. Killiondude (talk) 00:27, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
The following is a better summary of the problem dates. The following shows the last page I quickly found with seemingly full stats and the first page that I did not see stats for.
It's up again for 11 February now. While I saw a graph yesterday where only 6th, 8th and 10th February were missing, the graph for the same page today shows a gap from 5 thru 11 February... Does anyone know if the missing data will be restored? --78.53.66.106 (talk) 21:29, 12 February 2015 (UTC) (PS ping @Jackson665: as you asked there :)
I use the service regularly for it.wiki and I've noticed some lack of data on January, the 27th, but in the previous months it has been performing quite well. It did show some interruptions in the past, but not recently.--Alexmar983 (talk) 21:26, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
In collaborating on a new, stable, pageview system? grok.se and wikiviewstats are both maintained by single users who haven't been active in months. I don't have the time or interest to do it all myself (plus, we obviously want to avoid having a single person running important systems like this), but I have some experience (and already-written code) from popularpages. So if 2 or 3 other people are interested, I'd also be in. Mr.Z-man05:06, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this is still a plan, but last October, the WMF said that they were trying to build a new page view system: "Negrin told [the Signpost] that they are aware of the problem [with grok.se] and are currently working to replace the current apparatus with a "modern, scalable system," which will come out in a preliminary form next quarter." Now, my memory could be wrong and the WMF was referring to something else ... but that's one reason we have pings. TNegrin (WMF)Ed[talk][majestic titan]18:09, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
And there's been nothing since Feb 11 as far as I can see - not even blank entries now, just no update to the chart at all. Squinge (talk) 06:36, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
EN WP pageview stats are all caught up except for one date
Since I believe that the pageview statistics are done alphabetically, I have looked at the pageview stats for Zoo and believe that all the problematic February dates have been caught up and the only remaining date at issue is January 27, which cut off somewhere between Royce White and Tim Hardaway, Jr.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 06:21, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Looking good to me too. I've checked a number of pages on my watchlist and they're all up to date with the exception of Jan 27. Squinge (talk) 10:54, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
I know this is a recurring problem that has been happening for years. But we have not had stats since Feb 17: Main page stats. Any chance WMF will be hooking the articles up to a more reliable method? — Maile (talk) 13:11, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments1 person in discussion
Off and on for a few weeks now I've been working on trying to reduce the backlog at Special:NewPagesFeed (currently up to December 7th). I've found the page curation toolbar to be extremely helpful. Yesterday, it was gone. I figured I must have mucked something up in my preferences, so I played around with them and then it came back. I have not changed them at all since then, but today it's gone again. Does anyone know what's going on with that? I can't even mark a page as reviewed. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving19:31, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Google has changed the way it's links worked, at least I don't recall them working this way in the past, and PDFs no longer point to the document but an intermediate google page with the URL encoded in it. I'm trying to cite the paper "DARPA Paves the Way for U.S. Efforts in Ballistic Missile Defense", which if you Google, will find the document but if you click on it will not reveal the URL. In this case the complete URL is listed in green, but in every other case it runs out of that area and has been mangled. Does anyone know a simple way to get the original URL from Google? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:41, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! Fixed the other article, an airport, as well. I also reported this to Anomie, since it first appeared when the bot tagged it; without even looking at the page or the diffs, he identified the problem correctly. Surely this isn't the only nonexistent category with this problem: I assume that other months and other types of cleanup categories have been mangled this way (e.g. Category:Wikipedia articles needing clarification from September 2,014, although that's empty), but I don't know how to search for them without manually examining every page individually. Is there a way to get a list of all pages that are included in nonexistent categories with names including "2,001" through "2,015"? Perhaps a database dump? Nyttend (talk) 15:01, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
A "fuzzy" search does work, search for "statements from 2,013"~1 and following years (2013 seems to be earliest year with this problem), see extended search help. But of course a more professional SQL query would be better in the long run. GermanJoe (talk) 16:14, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
PS: Searching for the shorter "from 2,013"~1 will catch all maintenance categories, that follow the "... from month year" convention. A few false positives sneak in, but the results appear to be (almost) complete. GermanJoe (talk) 17:09, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Would it be easier to have a bot do it one at a time? I'm imagining that the bot creates a list by opening every subcategory of Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month and expanding the name by adding "from MONTH Y,EAR". With this done, it simply checks every item on the list, and it logs any categories that have entries. There are currently 163 subcategories; with 15 possible years, and 12 possible months per year, this works out to 29,340 nonexistent categories that it would need to check. Reasonable or unreasonable? Nyttend (talk) 16:32, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
The easiest way is probably to just run a query like select distinct cl_to from categorylinks where cl_to like '%\_2,0__'; on Tool Labs. Doing that just now turned up the following:
So not that many categories to look at currently. I might look into writing a bot task to automatically fix the common cases, if someone wants to help by identifying any besides {{Infobox settlement|population total=}}. Anomie⚔19:02, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
!!!Fuck You!!! - search question
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
Why does typing a hash character # into the search box bring up !!!Fuck You!!! as one of the first results, while typing an exclamation mark ! – apparently the first character of that string – does not? Is this some sort of intentional Easter-egg feature? I don't mind, but ask because there was an email to OTRS about it. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 19:20, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Interesting, I vaguely recall some other unexpected result on commons, and when I try it here today I get a perfectly boring and correct "Number sign". Monobook, Chrome, almost no gadgets. –Be..anyone (talk) 19:35, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
My guess: since # is used for anchors, the search box ignores it and starts listing all articles. But if you type ! it uses some algorithm to determine which articles beginning with ! you're more likely to want. Note that !! gets you fucked in the seventh position. --NE219:40, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes most likely, # is invalid to start page titles with so it will probably strip that character at some point and search for everything. While ! possibly does some ranking in the results starting with !. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:44, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago17 comments8 people in discussion
For the past couple days Wikipedia has been very slow on loading, getting stuck on transferring data from bits.wikimedia.org. I've cleared my cache/cookies, but even things on Wi-Fi experience these slow speeds. KyoufuNoDaiou (talk) 04:10, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
It's extremely slow again, not even loading. I had to use noscript to get here. This image took something like 2 minutes to load only after I opened it in a new tab. https://bits.wikimedia.org/images/wikimedia-button.png It seems to be anything coming from bits slows it down. Let me know if you need anything else, I appreciate the help. It's only bits as well. I can view the page source a couple seconds after loading the page, it's just that nothing displays.KyoufuNoDaiou (talk) 02:38, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
@KyoufuNoDaiou: I suggest using the command traceroute bits.wikimedia.org (or tracert bits.wikimedia.org) to check which specific intermediate hosts between you and bits.wikimedia.org are slow. I'm not sure if it's related, but for the record, at Japanese Wikipedia some people (presumably all of which were connecting from Japan) simlarly reported slowness between February 14-18. Whym (talk) 03:12, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
It's working at a good speed again today. If it slows down again (hopefully not) and the reply time is coming from a Wikipedia server, I'll post again. Thanks!KyoufuNoDaiou (talk) 15:53, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
I've had extremely slow load speeds for wikipedia all week, but today it is even worse. It is only wikipedia that is affected no other websites, and regardless of where I am trying to acces it from.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw·21:11, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
It's slow again for me as well. Most of the time traceroute gives good numbers (approx 55-85 ms) a couple times I got some higher ones (100-200 ms) but it still is slow.KyoufuNoDaiou (talk) 21:36, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
I think these are all issues with AT&T in the US (and possibly focused on the west coast?), we've had a couple of more reports from there as well. I haven't been able to pinpoint where the issue lies exactly so far, I'm afraid. I did made a change just now but it was more of a guess — please do let me know if you continue to see issues or if they are magically fixed. I'll reach out to AT&T contacts in the meantime to report the issue and possibly get some insight. Thanks for your report and for your patience! Faidon Liambotis (WMF) (talk) 07:23, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Ah, I've been getting this behavior too, and I'm on AT&T U-verse on a dynamic IP on the west coast (Mountain View, CA). My current traceroute to bits.wikimedia.org looks like this (I'm posting this for the route, not the times, and I have no timing issues at the moment anyway):
traceroute to bits.wikimedia.org (208.80.154.234), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 homeportal (192.168.1.254) 0.949 ms 0.790 ms 0.740 ms
2 99-45-168-2.lightspeed.sntcca.sbcglobal.net (99.45.168.2) 19.612 ms 25.996 ms 19.302 ms
3 71.145.0.196 (71.145.0.196) 27.317 ms 19.185 ms 19.794 ms
4 12.83.39.189 (12.83.39.189) 20.220 ms
12.83.39.185 (12.83.39.185) 20.219 ms 20.898 ms
5 12.122.149.137 (12.122.149.137) 21.978 ms 23.541 ms 24.127 ms
6 192.205.37.58 (192.205.37.58) 22.712 ms 23.026 ms 22.803 ms
7 ae-9.r22.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.241) 23.488 ms 22.586 ms 22.569 ms
8 ae-7.r23.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.6.238) 88.753 ms 93.651 ms 89.593 ms
9 ae-45.r06.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.6.11) 88.924 ms 94.450 ms 92.912 ms
10 * * *
...
This slowdown behavior seems to depend on the time of day, being the worst in mid to late afternoon local time. It's completely absent right now (11:30 PM local time), but unless your change fixed it, I would expect it to return around the same time tomorrow. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 07:34, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
We debugged this extensively with an AT&T engineer. They made some recommendations on which paths to use and which to avoid, as some of their paths are currently congested for various reasons. I've made some adjustments to our config to use a different carrier and it's very likely it may help. Please do let me know if you keep seeing slowdowns, esp. if you are an AT&T customer. Thanks! Faidon Liambotis (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
Lately, whenever I try to save an edit that includes a new external link, I get a red error message saying "Incorrect or missing CAPTCHA". This is despite not having been prompted to enter one. When I go to the bottom of the page and enter the CAPTCHA that does now appear, everything works. However, the sequence of events, which always used to offer a CAPTCHA prompt on save, is now broken. 86.150.71.35 (talk) 02:00, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
For the past several days, every time I try to download and generate a PDF file for an article(s) I get a Wikimedia Foundation Error result. Also, every time I try to generate a pdf file with one column I get a Rendering failed result. When I switch to two columns there are no problems -- until recently, that is. As I said, I'm getting a Wiki'Foundation error all the time now. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 23:12, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Is anyone planning to go to the Hackathon in Lyon, France (23–25 May 2015)? The WMF devs are looking for some volunteers to partner with. People with all kinds of skills (including language and design skills) are needed, and you might get a chance to work with some of the WMF's rockstar devs. If you're interested, please read the linked pages about how to volunteer. (You can e-mail me if you need help figuring out how the process works.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:06, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
This page is one of the central pages for reaching technically minded people from all over the world, which is why I chose it for the sole message I've posted. Also, these events seem to be, in practice, mostly English-speaking. But the information has been announced by other people/in other ways, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
New CSS in Firefox
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion
Hi all; if anybody here uses Firefox, but has not yet upgraded from Firefox 35 to FF 36, please describe the appearance of the underline in this text. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:57, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
On Safari, when I hover over a inter-wiki link I see a pop-up that appears. The text in the popup is identical to the link text - it does not display either the URL or the "real" link below it. For instance, the link to Point Magu in one of my articles points to Naval Air Station Point Mugu, but this does not appear in the popup. Anyone know what this is and what it's for? Maury Markowitz (talk) 23:30, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
I suspect you are using wrong terminology. Please post a link to the article with your example, and say where on the article you see it. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:42, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
When I just looked at the page LIM-49 Nike Zeus, and placed my mouse over Point Mugu, the pop-up worked (showing a redirect to Point Mugu, California and the first paragraph of that article). If you are you saying that the popup is just a text repeat of the text of the link, what may be happening is that the page hasn't completely loaded, or the server is busy; at least, that's when it happens to me from time to time. --Arxiloxos (talk) 00:25, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
The report is very confused. An interwiki link is a link to another wiki. This is apparently about a wikilink, i.e. a link to another English Wikipedia page. Nike Zeus is not an article, it is a redirect to LIM-49 Nike Zeus. The string "Point Magu" does not occur in LIM-49 Nike Zeus. The string "Point Mugu" occurs twice. Once without being linked and once as an unpiped link Point Mugu which redirects to Point Mugu, California and not to Naval Air Station Point Mugu. I guess this is what really happens for Maury: On the article LIM-49 Nike Zeus he hovers over "Point Mugu" in the "Testing" section and if he clicks it then he goes to Point Mugu, California, but the mouseover only says "Point Mugu". I guess Arxiloxos has enabled either "Navigation popups" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets or "Hovercards" Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures, and Maury Markowitz has neither. If you have neither then you get the same as logged out users: A small box with the name of the link target and nothing else. The link in LIM-49 Nike Zeus says [[Point Mugu]] which renders as Point Mugu. The small box says "Point Mugu" exactly as it's supposed to. Point Mugu is a redirect to Point Mugu, California but the small box doesn't examine that. If it had been a piped link [[Point Mugu, California|Point Mugu]] which renders as Point Mugu, then the small box would have said "Point Mugu, California". PrimeHunter (talk) 00:58, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Automatic capitalization of title-initial Unicode characters
Latest comment: 9 years ago13 comments7 people in discussion
Has the automatic capitalization of initial letters in titles been changed recently? ɱ is no longer autocapitalized to Ɱ. Compare this to ɔ, which correctly becomes Ɔ. Gorobay (talk) 15:23, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
The capitalized form of ⟨ɱ⟩ is ⟨Ɱ⟩. Therefore, Ɱ should be the same page as Ɱ, but it is not. Similarly, Ꞅ redirects to Insular S, but its lowercase form (ꞅ) does not. Similarly, Ỽ is an article, but its lowercase form ỽ does not exist. That means that some characters are not being capitalized properly. Gorobay (talk) 15:49, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Look under the title of the target articles — go to ɔ and you correctly see (Redirected from Ɔ) (because it capitalises the letter), but for some weird reason, going to ɱ provides a message of (Redirected from ɱ). Or click the link, to examine the redirect directly; you'll see an uppercase Ɔ and a lowercase ɱ for the page titles. Nyttend (talk) 17:17, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Couple of years back ɱ (talk·contribs) had a lot of trouble because the system suddenly started uppercasing their username to Ɱ (talk·contribs). I believe they couldn't edit their user page or access their contributions, and other things were not possible. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:21, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
It seems that the lowercase user was renamed to uppercase in early 2013, but the lowercase user still seems to exist with zero edits on other projects. Very confusing. --Stefan2 (talk) 17:26, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Capitalization only works with character pairs encoded in Unicode 4.0. I guess some MediaWiki config file thinks it’s still 2003. However, Utf8Case.ser (the version in MediaWiki 1.25wmf17) maps ⟨ɱ⟩ to ⟨Ɱ⟩, so it should still work. What else controls capitalization? Gorobay (talk) 20:32, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
I tested this on my local test installation of the MediaWiki software and it works fine (the page title "ɱ" automatically transforms to "Ɱ"). There must be something wrong with the way WMF wikis in particular are configured. — This, that and the other (talk)23:44, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments5 people in discussion
I frequently find that after editing, in trying to hit the "save" button, I will inadvertently hit the adjoining link to CC-BY-SA-3.0 License. Can we somehow provide a little safe space around what is arguably the most important widget on Wikipedia? LeadSongDogcome howl!13:53, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Most users probably have the links in MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning on the first line to the right of the buttons in the edit window. I don't think we should add spaces in the interface for everybody just to avoid that some users get a link in the vicinity of a button. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:18, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
That's why I suggested personal customisation. But MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning isn't to the right of the buttons, it's directly above, in both Vector and MonoBook. If LeadSongDog doesn't want to hide that block of text, they can increase the gap below it with a rule like
Thank you for the suggestions on simplifying my life, but of course personal customization does nothing for the vast majority of users who are not logged in. Can we not simply use the same space presently above the copyright warning, but put it below it instead? The problem is particularly egregious when working in Safari on the iPad with fat fingers.... It probably runs afoul of some wp:accessibility principles too. LeadSongDogcome howl!16:11, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
The problem would only affect users working on 4:3 resolutions as far as I can tell, on 16:9 and 16:10 resolutions there is no link close to the save page button. Sam Walton (talk) 16:17, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
LeadSongDog, can you clarify your request? Do you want an extra blank line underneath the copyright notice, or do you want the copyright notice underneath the Save button?
Not suggesting any change to the notice, just looking for some space above the "Save page" button to separate it from the CC BY-SA 3.0 License link. If vertical space is an issue, reducing the gap below "Watch this page" or below the "Save page" would do it. LeadSongDogcome howl!01:20, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm not a lawyer and don't work for WMF but I guess the legal concern is that By clicking the "Save page" button, you agree to... should be close to the "Save page" button so contributors are clearly warned of what they agree to. The text also starts above the button for me. Earlier I meant that the part containing the links is not near the Save button on my screen where the line wraps after the last link on "GFDL". On narrow screens/windows or with large fonts the line may wrap earlier and place a link near the Save button. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:40, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Well that's the real argument for having a separate checkbox for "I understand" before enabling the save page button, but that's a rather larger change than 2 or 3 en of white space. LeadSongDogcome howl!03:10, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Colors in vector skin?
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hello, I need some help please (Windows XP, FF 36, Vector skin). For some reason all colors within my Wikipedia windows are brighter and/or messed up. For example: WP:PR usually had a light green background color for me, but now is very light gray, almost white. The documentation box in template:cite web was light green, but is now very light blue. Project banners on talkpages have been turquiose / light greenish and are now bright yellow. The Wiki browser page as a whole "looks" brighter. Any idea, where to look for such settings or how to reset them to the "old" status? (I tried to reset brightness and contrast on my monitor and graphic settings, but with no success). GermanJoe (talk) 14:36, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for checking, Gadget850. I did a complete color recalibration in my monitor setup and that somehow fixed the problem. I still don't know, how the settings got corrupted to begin with, but never mind - it's OK again :). GermanJoe (talk) 15:20, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Did you upgrade graphics drivers (either manually or through Windows Update)? I had this problem about 6 years ago on XP with new NVidia drivers defaulting to some whacky color settings. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 20:36, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
In case you are curious, the problem appears to be that the use of a match selection index (in this case, "-1") is incompatible with the use of the start anchor tag "^".
{{#invoke:String|match|Foo (bar)|^.*%s%((.-)%)|||ignore_errors=true}} -> bar
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
I'm not sure exactly where to ask this, so I thought this would be the best place: Is there a magic word/parser function that automatically detects the target of a redirect (and returns that value) if the page which the magic word/parser function is placed is a redirect? I'm just wondering since there's an edit I would like to perform on {{Db-redirnone}}, but I can only do it properly if that magic word/parser function exists. Steel1943 (talk) 20:56, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
@SiBr4: Thanks for letting me know about that Lua module. However, I tested it out, and I cannot use it for my intended purpose since I cannot use the parser function {{{FULLPAGENAME}}} for the "redirect-page-name". I'm going to ask this on the module's talk page. Thanks again for finding this. Steel1943 (talk) 21:55, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Neither using the page the module is on as parameter nor using magic words fails by itself. However, placing any text above the redirect breaks the redirect, so the module returns the current page name. Therefore you'll need something else for the deletion template to work. SiBr4 (talk)08:42, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Template:Main - appearance (or lack thereof) on mobile browsers
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
More generally, all hatnotes (specifically, all elements with the hatnote CSS class) are hidden unless the display width is large enough. This means important navigation information is missing for mobile users who don't think to (or can't) rotate the display to a landscape configuration. Hairy Dude (talk) 16:26, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Unlabeled star is meaningless to newcomers and many advanced editors
Latest comment: 9 years ago24 comments14 people in discussion
At the top of my page there is an unlabeled star. When I hover over it I get a message stating, "Add this page to your watchlist." Why doesn't it bear a label so editors will know what it is supposed to do? I know (now), but for a long time I didn't. While I'm at it, there is a label marked "TW." I am surmising that this is short for "Twinkle," but really I have no idea what Twinkle is. Why must we have such ingroup labels at the tops of our pages? Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 06:51, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
I would say, what's wrong with the star, when you can hover over it to see what it does? And you must have enabled Twinkle for yourself if you see "TW" there. Twinkle is not enabled for all users, only those who choose to enable it. The "TW" abbreviation is used simply to save space, not as an intentional obfuscation measure. — This, that and the other (talk)13:03, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
The star icon has become a browser standard: Firefox, IE and others use it for bookmarks. The watchlist icon was chosen as an analogue to bookmarks. --Gadget850talk13:24, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Chrome and IE use it so IMHO it makes sense for us too, As for Twinkle - It's easier and with the greatest respect I'd imagine 90% know what it is so not really seeing any need to change the star or even consider doing so. But that's just my 2¢. –Davey2010Talk13:38, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
I know very well what they both mean, but I do agree if I didn't I would be upset when viewing from my mobile in desktop mode where I can't 'just hover' over either to see. I'm guessing if I was first editing from a tablet I'd be upset too since it is another touch device without hover. I'd suspect that it would be a good idea to include in our vector.css/js a way to determine if the user is on a touch device and 'use our words' instead of symbols. Just my 2cp on it, and I really don't care anyways except I was a little annoyed by the direction of this discussion. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)13:43, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Technical 13 - "little annoyed by the direction of this discussion" - Well I'm assuming it's me - I've read my comment 4 times and still see nothing wrong with it so could you explain what I've said that's ticked you off?.... –Davey2010Talk14:08, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
For once I have to agree with T13 here. Every other function on the Wikipedia page is represented by words, not an icon (at least until you get into edit mode and use the RefToolbar). It's kind of jarring. Besides, mystery meat navigation is never a good thing. By default, I think that Watch and Unwatch would be better. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 14:22, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
1) Watching articles really, really matters. Watching articles, looking at your watchlist is the engine of Wikipedia! If nobody watches articles, they degrade. Recent Changes patrol is not able to be our only quality control, and page watchers are regularly better qualified to assess the merits of an edit. I would even say that it is erroneous to quantify "user activity" or "editor attrition" by number of new user registrations, or by new users with +1 edits, but that "regular users" is the important metric: "users that watch articles".
I don't know how to count those users, but for the trends we can take these old stats 2013/2014 about article numbers (in thousands=k) and number of "superuser" (phantasyname for user with >100 edits per month) and calculate the number of articles "to watch" per superuser (in thousands=k) :
You notice the wikis with lots of botgenerated articles, but this is not my point here: More articles over time and not more users over time = problem to watch articles and maintain quality. In July 2013 every "superuser" would have to watch 1300 articles, to have all articles watched (by all 3281 "superusers"). In August 2014 every "superuser" would have to watch 1500 articles, to have all articles watched (by all 3056 "superusers"). We need watchers!
2) There is another aspect, that may be a problem. New users attention could be diverted by the more prominent colourful notifications (introduced in 2013). And while the notifications are about me-me-me (my edits, my conversations, my thanks, my status, my reverts, ...), the watchlist is about the articles, about actual Wikipedia content. In the old days, there was only the watchlist and the users talkpage - now the notifications could distract contributors from that. I found some research about the introduction of notifications in 2013, which seems to support my concerns that the competition for user attention between the "me-me-me-notifications-bling-icon" vs. "static watchlist-link" has harmful effects on productivity:
meta:Research:Notifications/Experiment_1#Summary: Our results suggest that the presence of Notifications effectively increases the amount of activity that new users will engage in (more edits, more edit sessions and more hours spent editing). However, the effect of Notifications on the productivity of new users is unclear. On average, users with Notifications were less likely to make productive contributions to articles, but in our experiment, a few highly productive newcomers made up some of the difference. Our results also show that newcomers with Notifications enabled are more burdensome. They made more edits that were reverted by others and they were more likely to be blocked.
3) I think showing the word "watch" (or not) is the kind of small change that you don't notice if you have clicked the watchstar dozends of times, but that can have a real impact for how new users use Wikipedia and how much they are "dragged in" by the watchlist.
4) I think we should do A/B testing to find out if there is an effect for new users. It would be a very small change, there can't be any harm and the test would be limited to a certain period. What do you think?
Thank you! Surely we could replace the star with "Watch" or "Unwatch," as the case may be?? 22:47, 25 February 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by GeorgeLouis (talk • contribs)
Little Barrier Island is the result of pagemove vandalism (see WP:STOCKS); the Main Page got moved to Hauturu/Little Barrier Island some time back, so everyone watching the Main Page ended up with both pages on their watchlists. Probably a lot of the watchers are no longer active, since we don't currently have a ton of active editors who were active when the event happened. Nyttend (talk) 02:32, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Interesting to see that nobody notices that the word "Watch" outside of the context of MediaWiki is probably less 'informing' and meaningful (so even more mystery meat) than the 'star' icon is to all people. If I remember correctly, that was confirmed by user testing in 2009 and actually led the Vector team to switch away from that word to a more common representation that people know from bookmarks etc. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:27, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Wow. Many old-timers only dimly remember our pre-WP days, which is why software is tested on the innocent. So, the whole concept of article watching, is what newbies don't get. Once that's understood, the question of star or word becomes a small one. And we've stumbled into a slightly related topic, the poor interface for mobile. That's one reason why I seldom use my Android phone for editing, and not often my iPad. The idea of an intermediate level of interface, showing as much as my real computer does but not relying on hover box or tooltip (the distinction makes little difference) is appealing but our clever and industrious software developers are already 'way behind the likes of Facebook or GMail in serving the various platforms. It seems a bit much to add to their load. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:49, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
We are getting into some serious and arcane in-groupishness here. How and where do I make an official request to replace the star with a word or (better) a phrase? GeorgeLouis (talk) 17:15, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
"looking at your watchlist is the engine of Wikipedia" I have over 8000 pages on my watchlist. It's not quite as useful as you might image. :-) Maury Markowitz (talk) 00:23, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Maury Markowitz, I'm dead serious about "watchlists = the engine of Wikipedia". The individual watchlist is a small cog in the machine, but together watchlists are the engine. Because they feed editor attention. We can see the effect of watchlists in "editing burst" at articles. Even after bots: articles show up in watchlists and are checked and edited by other editors afterwards. Editing is contagious :-) --Atlasowa (talk) 18:14, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Account creation hooks like the watchlist star are an effective way to draw more new users to sign up
Over half (56%) of new users creating an account on mobile came directly from the watchlist star CTA. This number is an underestimate of users coming from the CTA, since we were not logging users who first visited the login link from the CTA and then tapped on Create account from the login page.
New users may not understand or value the watchlist star feature as much as existing Wikimedians
The vast majority of one-time watchlist star users were brand-new Wikimedians who had registered via mobile. However, the vast majority of users who tapped the star more than once were existing users who already had a Wikimedia account.
Very few users are unwatching pages from their watchlist view
Either most users are not finding their watchlist view, or the unwatch-from-watchlist feature is not useful for those who do find it.
Overall, the watchlist star hook + account creation has proven to be a very effective new account creation funnel, helping arrest the year-over-year decline of new account creations
Since the full deployment of account creation and watchlist star to the mobile web, new account creations have held steady at about 800 global registrations/400 English Wikipedia registrations per day. These additional account are pushing the hourly registration rates up to 2012 levels.
Maybe we should have:
Watch
Unwatch and above:
Watchlist
And when you click watch, the star starts *spinning* AND above the watchlist icon should *blink* or *glow*, so that you see these things are connected. --Atlasowa (talk) 17:53, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Linking to IPV6 user accounts
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
If subpages in mainspace are "disabled", why aren't they disabled?
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Wikipedia:Subpages tells us that "in main namespace (article namespace) ... the subpage feature has been disabled in the English Wikipedia". So how could a page such as Barbara Borts/Temp get created? It's the second one of these I've come across in the last few days (editors apparently find it counter-intuitive to work on a draft in talkspace). Might it be an idea to actually disable mainspace subpages if people aren't supposed to make them? Or limit the capability to admins or something? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 17:54, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
"disabled" does not mean that pagenames with '/' are impossible. It just means they are treated like any other mainspace pagename, and the features associated with subpages do not apply. For example, Barbara Borts/Temp has no automatically added link to Barbara Borts at the top. Compare to Talk:Barbara Borts/Temp which does have a link to Talk:Barbara Borts. The talk page is a subpage but the mainspace page is not. This is admittedly confusing. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:59, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I see (and knew) that names with a slash are possible; I too am unsure how often the mistake is made, I just happen to have seen it twice in a short space (both times experienced editors rewriting copyvio pages). It may be better to live with that level of background noise. But what is easily fixed is the documentation: if subpages are not disabled, we shouldn't really be saying that they are. If what we actually mean is "mainspace pages containing a slash character do not become subpages; instead, the whole name is treated as the pagename", then that might be a better way of explaining it. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:59, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
But they are disabled. Subpages are a feature which can be enabled or disabled in each namespace with mw:Manual:$wgNamespacesWithSubpages. It's called enable and disable in the MediaWiki documentation and those are the common and perfectly fine names for features which can, well, be enabled or disabled. It's used about hundreds of MediaWiki and Wikipedia features. Wikipedia:Subpages is not a technical help page but an editing guideline in project space. It starts: Except in main namespace (article namespace), where the subpage feature has been disabled in the English Wikipedia, subpages are pages separated with a "/" (a slash) from their 'parent' page.
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments3 people in discussion
I tried nominating a Wikimedia user page for deletion due to WP:G11, however, I'm failing to login because everytime I refresh it never logs me in, instead it shows me the Central login message. How can I fix this? --ToonLucas22 (talk) 22:02, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Foundation runs a lot of wikis and some of them don't allow account creation or login without permission. Please post a link to the page you want deleted and the page where you try to log in. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:14, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
You didn't post the requested link to the page where you try to log in. The wiki of the user page is called meta or Meta-Wiki and not Wikimedia so I wonder whether it's another wiki you try to log in at. Please post the url of the login page. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:51, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 08:49, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Resolved: Magog the Ogre (t • c) 19:15, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:
–Be..anyone (talk) 22:13, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Done Jackmcbarn (talk) 01:32, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Done Solved at MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-details. — xaosflux Talk 01:56, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
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Template editor group or as part of a new admin-tech/interface-editor/sysop group that would be the next level of of TE. I look forward to someone making that proposal in a productive manner that will get community support. — 
) shows that those are the only summaries that work. The tag needs to be improved to cover summaries like:
Watch
Unwatch
Watchlist
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