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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 131

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Minor nit about watchlist tags for mobile edits

It seems that if an edit is tagged as "mobile web edit" or "mobile app edit", it is also tagged as "mobile edit" (example). Given that the first implies the second, is it possible to only display the more precise tag (mobile web/app edit) and suppress the more general tag? Or does the tag system not work that way? Is there even any other way to edit from mobile if not from the app or from the web? Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 00:42, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. I actually suggested this back when we were looking at rolling the app out, and the Analytics team at the WMF suggested that we use the current structure as it was easier for them. So I don't think we can change this at this time. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 21:08, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Notification not clearing

For some reason the red "1" won't clear, even when I log out and clear cookies, or view the changes, after an article I started (Molecular gyroscope) was linked to from molecular machine. It had cleared just a short time before when linked from gyroscope. Did someone break something? Wnt (talk) 20:40, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Note: I did eventually clear this by turning off notifications then turning them back on again - the problem is, a different ping came in right when I was doing this, so I'm not actually sure which category turned off and on cleared it. Wnt (talk) 21:55, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Adding a picture in a table with background color?

Hey, I have the page WWII Puppet States, and I have a table with most of (hopefully) the puppet states in WWII. In this page, there is a table. Some of the info in this table have background colors, using the tool bgcolor=, and then a color, like lightgreen. I'm trying to add a column to the table with flags, however, on the corresponding row, the background color goes over the image. You can still mouse over and click the link of the picture, but you can't actually see it.

I asked this over at the help desk and after several days of no response, someone redirected me here. Hope it can get resolved.

Thanks for any help. Cnd474747 (talk) 00:53, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

@Cnd474747: Could you add the table with the flags to your sandbox so that we can see the code you're using? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:39, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
@Mr. Stradivarius: I would love to, but for simplicity's sake I'll just post a snippet of the problem here.
Created Disestablished Puppet State Flag Country/territory Notes
1921-08-14 1944-10-11
  •  
  • Tuvan: Tьвa Arat Respuвlik
  • Russian: Урянхайский край
  Tannu Uriankhai, part of China Also known as "Tuva," Russia had been sending people (mainly farmers and fishermen) in to Tuva since 1860. In 1921, Russian-backed Bolsheviks stormed Tuva, after recently having declared its independence during the Mongolian Revolution of 1921. It was later annexed into the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast, per request of the "Little Khural," the executive committee of the Great Khural.
1939-12-01 1940-03-12
  •  
  • Finnish: Suomen kansanvaltainen tasavalta
  • Russian: Финский Демократическая Республика
 (no official flag was established) Finland Encompassing the Hanko Peninsula, Suursaari, Seiskarim Lavansaari, Tytärsaari, and "Great and Little Koivisto", the Finnish Democratic Republic (sometimes also called the "Terijoki Government," because Terjoki was the first town to be captured by the Soviets) was created during the Winter War, and later merged with the Karelian ASSR to make the Karelo-Finnish SSR

That's weird, I swear it wasn't working the other day.Cnd474747 (talk) 01:50, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Backtracking strange nuisance exploits

I frequently get a notification by e-mail stating that somebody has requested a password reset. However, instead of my username it says: "Username:?" It looks as though someone is trying to gain access but somehow there is a connection between my e-mail address and some account that doesn't have a printable username. Is there any way to go from an e-mail address to all accts that use that e-mail address? I know that whoever it is that initiates these requests can't get into my acct, but this nonsense has been going on for two or three years. The IP address that starts this process is always some mobile phone-type site, often in Europe, occasionally in Canada...

Thanks. P0M (talk) 03:51, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Unique red links

Can some master of Wiki-fu generate for me a list of article-space red links that appear precisely one article in all of Wikipedia. I have a theory that a great many such links are likely to be either misspellings or links to topics that will never have an article on them (e.g. "nothing is known about 1890s relief pitcher Billy Joey Bloggs except that as a child he lived on a farm with his younger brother, Joey Jo-Jo Bloggs, who died of consumption at the age of 15"). Cheers! bd2412 T 16:46, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm running this query now, which should do it:
select pl_title from pagelinks
inner join page as srcpage on(pl_from = srcpage.page_id)
left outer join page as dstpage on(pl_title = dstpage.page_title)
where srcpage.page_namespace = 0 and pl_namespace = 0
and dstpage.page_title is null
group by pl_title
having count(*) = 1;
It will probably take a while. I'll let you know when it's done. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:39, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
It is apparently done. Howicus (Did I mess up?) 03:02, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
That's Betacommand's query, which should be the same as mine. For some reason, mine's not done though. Once it is, I'll compare the two. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:09, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
Sounds like it's going to be pretty big list. Well, more to do. Thanks for your help! bd2412 T 04:07, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
Mine was still running now, over 12 hours later. I ran out of patience and killed it, since Betacommand's is done. Just use his. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:31, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
/* Article Red Link Counter
 * Runtime: Untested <SLOW_OK>
 */
SELECT
  CONCAT("* [[", pl_title, "]]") AS Redlinks,
  SUM(src.page_namespace=0) AS ArticleCount,
  COUNT(*) AS TotalCount
FROM page AS src
JOIN pagelinks ON pl_from=src.page_id
LEFT JOIN page AS dst
       ON pl_namespace=dst.page_namespace AND pl_title=dst.page_title 
WHERE dst.page_title IS NULL AND pl_namespace=0
GROUP BY pl_title
HAVING ArticleCount BETWEEN 1 AND 1;

You forgot dstpage.page_namespace=0 which is why your query ran slow. I've improved it by adding namespace totals since some people and WikiProjects like WP:VG keep internal lists of missing articles (And fixes another bug in your query). The submitter then can use Pivot Tables (MS Excel or LibreOffice) to narrow the results. — Dispenser 16:35, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Also, thanks. bd2412 T 13:14, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
Just to be clear, is this list actually being generated somewhere, or are you just discussing how to generate it? bd2412 T 12:28, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Hashes into Section

To whomever was responsible for translating hash-marks in see-also wiki-URLs in into the section-marker... thank you. Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:16, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Looks like that was Mr. Stradivarius through module:hatnote. --  Gadget850 talk 16:42, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
You're welcome! Credit also belongs to Codename Lisa for having the idea in the first place. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 00:35, 4 October 2014 (UTC)
Mr. Stradivarius, can it be adapted to not misformat already piped links to sections? The end of MOS:LINK2SECT displays the example {{See also|Help:Link#Section linking (anchors){{!}}Section linking help}} which renders like below (currently badly).
See also: Section linking help
I have long wondered whether the hacky use of {{!}} to make piped links in some template parameters (not just hatnotes but also infoboxes and others) would cause problems later. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:05, 4 October 2014 (UTC)
That would be easy to fix, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better to fix the individual transclusions to not include {{!}}. If we wanted to do that, we could add a tracking category to Module:Hatnote to detect pages where they appear so that they can be changed to non-pipe versions. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 03:19, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
I've made the fix in Module:Hatnote to detect piped links made with {{!}} now. (Notice that the link above displays properly again.) I'm still not sure that allowing this is the best course of action, though, so I'm thinking of adding tracking categories to the individual hatnote modules as well. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:03, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the fix. Relying on the fix or removing the instances are both OK by me. I don't know how common {{!}} is to make pipes in hatnotes. I mainly see it used in infoboxes. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:08, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

The donation popup should not scale with page size.

As a visually impaired person I have to increase page size for all pages in order to be able to read anything, but with the wikipedia donation popup. I get this large obtrusive page like This. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.58.108.131 (talk) 23:36, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi 68.58.108.131, I'm sorry to hear you have had trouble closing the donation banner on Wikipedia! I am sending this information along to my team to see if there is anything we can do to resolve it. In the meantime, we have a few workarounds to hide banners:
I hope that helps! Thanks for the feedback, and please feel free to email the Fundraising team at donate wikimedia.org. --CCogdill (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Template:Top icon seems to be broken in Monobook

Template:GA user topicon (which inherits from Template:Top icon) seem to now give a display style of "none" for all the icons. See User:Ritchie333/TopIcons for example. Works okay in Vector, but not in Monobook. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:15, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

@Ritchie333: What browser and OS are you using? Your example page worked ok for me when I used this monobook-ified link in Firefox on Ubuntu. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:33, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Windows 7 64 bit, Google Chrome, user agent is : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.124 Safari/537.36 But it's just started working again. The important bit seems to be the default monobook.js overriding the style on a div in class "topicon" from "none" to "block !important" Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:38, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014

 
 
Did you know?

TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that caused replaced some categories with a link to the system message, MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor

A tool for editing TemplateData will be deployed to more Wikipedias soon.  Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation.  When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top.  Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes

Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the mw-redirect or mw-disambig class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these in types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as 'required' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358). 

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir attribute but no lang set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki

At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community has been posted here. Thank you all for your work.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. To help with translations, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre at Meta. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Problem with image size

 
Artwork showing locations and rites of Hajj

Recently I uploaded an image on Wikipedia. As it can be seen, it does not fit into the box. I can't understand where the problem is. On my PC, the image size is 900 x 570. The file has been used on Hajj article. Will anyone please tell me what the problem is? I used Illustrator CS 11 to edit this image after collecting it from an Arabic article where it fits nicely. -AsceticRosé 00:51, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Isn't your new file redundant to File:Hajj1.gif anyway? Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:53, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
Answering the original question, the image itself has a large transparent region to the left. It needs to be re-cropped. See this rendering to see the problem. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 00:56, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
@Jackmcbarn, Idon't think it is redundant. File:Hajj1.gif is much smaller and hence unclear.
@Orange Suede Sofa, in Illustrator, the image has no such extra transparent area so that I can crop. -AsceticRosé 01:15, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
I cropped it for you, using Photoshop. In Illustrator you need to adjust the "artboard" area, I think. Begoon talk 01:24, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Begoon for the cooperation. -AsceticRosé 01:33, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Adding accessdate parameter

If adding an accessdate parameter to a citation template, am I correct in that the original date the template was added should be used, and not the date the parameter was added, unless the editor verifies that the URL still supports the assertion? --NE2 10:30, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

The date used should be the last time someone verified the link still worked and contained what the citation asserts it contains. -Rrius (talk) 10:50, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
Oops, I thought I posted this on the policy pump. If anyone else feels it fits better there, feel free to move it. --NE2 11:43, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
As Rrius said, use the date when the link was last verified. The point of the parameter is to let readers now how recently the URL was known to work. Here is the full documentation from Template:Citation Style documentation:
accessdate Full date when original URL was accessed; use the same format as other access and archive dates in the citations; requires url. Do not wikilink. Not required for web pages or linked documents that do not change; mainly for use of web pages that change frequently or have no publication date. Can be hidden or styled by registered editors.
If you feel the documentation is misleading or incorrect in its wording, please consider improving it. Cheers, Jason Quinn (talk) 12:48, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
I ask because the "reflinks" script appears to add the current date as accessdate, at least as it's being used by one user as I confirmed by running it. --NE2 14:00, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
Yes, the date on which the referenced text supports the Wikipedia article text is what is recorded in |accessdate=. It is not the most recent date on which some server happened to respond to a request for that URL. The documentation has been updated to more clearly reflect this. The script should not be updating |accessdate= to the current date without user verification that the contents still support the text in the Wikipedia article. — Makyen (talk) 15:21, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
@Makyen and NE2: Then what should happen when the original reference does not have an accessdate? The tool currently does not expand references with anything beyond an external link. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 07:05, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Either don't add one at all, or go back in the history and find when the reference was added. --NE2 08:37, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) @Zhaofeng Li: The date which should be used for a missing |accessdate= is the date the reference was originally entered into the article. It can be assumed the person who entered it into the article actually was using the reference on that date. However, flagging it as something which a human should address by actually verifying the reference text supports the article text would be better. Note that it can be a non-trivial task to find the first date of when the reference was entered in the article, particularly if User:Citation bot was involved (in the past it has mangled citations quite effectively). The reference/citation can have changed form, some content and, of course, location within the page over its lifetime, potentially over several years. It can take multiple history searches to find the actual insertion of a reference with each search looking for the text that the reference was prior to a change. — Makyen (talk) 09:01, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

@Makyen and NE2: Thanks for the response. As there isn't a standard way to "flag" the references on-wiki currently, I've implemented an option to skip accessdate generation. Please try the the test version (check the "Do not add access dates in the result" box). Thanks. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 09:15, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

This should be the default, not a box that needs to be checked. Something also has to be done about all the bogus accessdates that have been added. --NE2 09:18, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
@Zhaofeng Li: Thank you for being responsive and making changes. I agree with both points which NE2 mentioned. Not changing the |accessdate= should be the default. The user should have to make an effort to change them. Probably, not just a checkbox. Certainly not a single checkbox for multiple references as changing the |accessdate= means you have actually read the reference and checked to be sure that it still supports the article text.
Reverting the already made changes to |accessdate=: Yes, this should be done. I expect that it will be a pain the the rear.
By flagging, I meant that within your user interface you indicate to the user that this particular reference should have human attention for reason X. In this case, because there was no |accessdate= and we need to figure out when the reference was inserted into the article. You can then have a link to the revision history search with the contents of the reference already filled in. Make sure to note to the user that multiple searches may be required and that they need to actually look at the diff to the version resulting from the history search to see if the reference was inserted, moved (note that they need to check at least one version earlier as it might be a copy-delete-save-paste-save type move), or changed and a new search initiated with the older version of the reference. There may be a need for multiple iterations of this process. — Makyen (talk) 10:04, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
This is an interest thread. Speaking as a user who regular follows citations and cite- can I add that there are two bits of information missing, verifiedby and verifieddate and even verifycomment. If I see an article in my specialism that has been verified by User:XYZ- who I know, than I am happy, If I see that it is User:Flopsybunny1996 I am likely not to trust it, and will wish to verify it. If the reference is vague but still useful I would like to comment on that. That said, all this needs to default when I chase a link- as I am not patient enough to lose focus by editing another set of boxes. What we are doing is enhancing the quality of the data.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 11:18, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
What if someone else trusts Flopsybunny1996 but not XYZ? --NE2 12:57, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Ditto- we have just saved them some work. We can all be more confident in the quality of the data if the verification is signed.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:27, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
You're missing my point. XYZ comes across the article and sees it's verified by Flopsybunny1996. XYZ thinks he's more reputable than Flopsybunny1996, and replaces Flopsybunny1996 with himself after verifying the citation. Now it's less useful to my hypothetical Flopsybunny1996-truster. (I realize Flopsybunny1996 was deliberately chosen to scream 'noob', but it would be simple to change it to two editors that are roughly equivalent and have slight biases on either side of an issue, thus people on the same side are more likely to trust one over the other.) --NE2 19:11, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
It really doesn't matter, the reference is not being changed. In 1% of cases- there may be two guys who want to do that- it will appear in the edit summmary. When I know that someone has verified it there is no more to do. If an IP verified it, I would want to check again. We are verifying the existence of a reference- not the quality (that can be put in the verifiedcomment field)- that could open a can of worms in a very few cases. In the case od edit warriors with POVs, then they would just change the reference. I surmise that the only people who do take references seriously are those of us who are trying to drag an article from start through C, B to the dizzy heights.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 20:28, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
While I am distracted, is there a known reason why the cite family of templates don"t default to ref=harv, thus allowing the Notes/Bibliography style of referencing, we all use. The editor citation entry wizard does't even have an box to add it. It is a real pain having to teach professional newbys that way to make this work is to type 20-10-2014|ref=harv into the date box. We do need to think about the way our editor base is changing- or, if this is too complicated, not. At the last training course a very useful professional did not know about the Ctrl key and was delighted to be shown Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 11:18, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
@ClemRutter: If ref=harv were turned on by default, two citations with the same author name and year would lead to invalid HTML. See Template:Citation/doc#IDs must be unique. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:36, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for that, and it is not trivial to code up a duplication check.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:27, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Sorry for the late response, will make no accessdate as default soon. @Smith609: Is it possible for you to make your Citation Bot find out when a reference was added, and add accessdate to it when appropriate? Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 09:15, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Working On A University Project About Wikipedia - Technical Questions About Its' Information Security Systems

Good evening, My name is Francisco Camões, I'm an 18 year-old student from Portugal. I'm currently studying at FEUP (Engeneering Faculty of Oporto's University). Me and 4 other students were given a theme to do a project about, which was to search for Wikipedia's systems to control the incoming information and it's fiability. Sadly, we couldn't find enough detailed information about it (we looked through practically every wikipedia's corner) and we're fearing our project won't correspond to our expectations. This beeing said, we would like to kindly ask you to provide us some information about the following subjects, if possible.

1. We know Wikipedia's extremely efficient in deleting "information vandalism" in its' databases, but we wanted to know how that is processed. Is the information filtered by any computer program (bot) or is it manually checked by wikipedia's staff &/or other individuals? Or both?

1.1. Does wikipedia use any program to detect (...) or is it manually deleted: - duplicated information - fake information

2. Do wikipedia users have different credibilty, when writing about an article, according to previous activity on wikipedia (this means: an individual who contributed with correct & verifiable information in other posts has a bigger chance of when writting a new article getting accepted and that article beeing posted online faster? If so, that process is executed automatically or manually by the wikipedia staff?)

We would be truly thankful if we received an answer from you because this project counts a lot to our final grade,

Kind Regards, Francisco Camões, FEUP, Oporto, Portugal --Franciscompnsc (talk) 08:09, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

"Wikipedia" is a vague concept. The Wikimedia foundation runs the servers and provides the infrastructure, but, as far as I know, there is no general automated gatekeeper system. Maintaining the quality of the information is done by the Wikipedia community (or communities, if you look at different projects). On the English Wikipedia, a number of Bots try to detect and revert vandalism using heuristics - see e.g. User:ClueBot. But these bots run on external servers (which may or may not be provided by the Wikimedia foundation) and use (mostly) the same API as normal users - in particular, on a technical level every user could run a bot on his own computer. However, bot operation is guided by community-enforced rules - see Wikipedia:Bots. On the other hand, many editors like working as "recent change patrollers" and improve or revert incoming changes. Yes, reputation does matter, but this is only on a social level. There is no "reputation score" being kept by the system, although users may well look at editing statistics when interacting with a user they don't know well. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:27, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
As a note, the vandal-fighting bot is User:ClueBot NG, from the family of ClueBots. As mentioned, it's volunteers' duty to verify the contents on Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the stability of the technical infrastructure, not the content, though some staffers regularly help us with the work as well. Also, there are pages with the Pending Changes feature enabled, which means every edit by new or anonymous users are manually checked by pending changes reviewers. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 08:47, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Also WP:Abuse filter - unfortunately, I have seen this abused for outright censorship just recently, and may be being used so still. The first and best "main line of defense" is patrolling of WP:Recent changes, originally done by hand, now more often perhaps with WP:Huggle or WP:Twinkle; these collaborate with the weaker setting of the abuse filter via Special:AbuseFilter/examine. Wikipedia also relies heavily on WP:Admins who try to block the source of vandalism via blocking accounts, WP:rangeblocks on IP addresses. Pending Changes is a rare and problematic form of WP:Page protection. Wnt (talk) 13:39, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Also should have mentioned WP:watchlists. Though these are used not infrequently more to check if your point of view differs with that of the watcher... Wnt (talk) 20:08, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

This is a good question, but please post any further replies on Franciscompnsc's talk page. Alsee (talk) 14:38, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

It's at User_talk:Franciscompnsc#Working_On_A_University_Project_About_Wikipedia_-_Technical_Questions_About_Its.27_Information_Security_Systems --15:50, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

RfC VE in Template:No article text

Please give comments at Template_talk:No_article_text#Include_visual_editor if you would like to see a reference to the Visual Editor in de Template:No article text or not. Thanks. Stratoprutser (talk) 09:24, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Strange issue with WMF Tool Labs

Hi, I've noticed a strange issue trying to access many of the tools on the WMF tool labs. When I load a page, I just get a blank screen (the HTML code is blank too). Tools affected include Earwig's copyvio tool, the edit counter and the articles created list. Possibly there are others, I haven't checked. I've already tried refreshing my browser; that doesn't work. If it's relevant, my browser is Firefox 32.0.3. It'd be great if anyone could shed some light as to what's going on. Thanks, --Jakob (talk) 00:19, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

When I click the coordinates link on geographic articles, it goes to https://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=... but I get a blank page and a 502 (bad gateway) error. Nurg (talk) 08:08, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
Working for me now. What caused the problem? Nurg (talk) 19:19, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
Edits by user is also down. --NeilN talk to me 14:08, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Generating traffic stats for a defined list of pages?

Hi all,

We've just finished the stub contest, and one of the prizes is for the most "visited" article which has been improved - ie, the one that had the most pageview hits on a given day. We have a strong suspicion as to which one it is, but manually checking a few hundred pages seems... an unpleasant way to confirm this :-)

Is there a script somewhere (or a tool) which can take a list of page titles and spit out the traffic numbers for a given day? Andrew Gray (talk) 22:23, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Category specific export

I want to know how to export wikipedia database xml dumps (ie, all pages) based on specific category. Example: --category:electronics Systemconsole™ (talk) 22:48, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

@Systemconsole™: The "Add pages from category" box on Special:Export. Jackmcbarn (talk) 01:23, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Change the title on the category page

There was an early attempt at Apple to make a networking system known as AppleNet. It was abandoned, and very little information on it exists. However, it is known that it was based on Xerox XNS, and that its failure led, indirectly, to AppleTalk. So I linked AppleTalk to the XNS category. Now how do I change the category link so it points to the sub-section on AppleNet? Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:56, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

@Maury Markowitz: You can't. What this edit did was to change the sort key of the category, i.e. how it is sorted alphabetically on the category page itself. You can't change the link targets of links on category pages. The closest thing you can do is to make a redirect to a section on the page you want and then categorise that redirect, but that doesn't seem to be what you are aiming to do here. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:20, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
No, but knowing I can't do it "solves" the problem after a fashion. Thanks! Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:27, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
@Maury Markowitz: As an illustration of the redirect technique mentioned above, see Category:Female drummers and look under "L" for Honey Lantree. It's in italics because a redirect - Honey Lantree - is categorized, rather than the target article (The Honeycombs), which is about a band (bands often include drummers, but are not themselves drummers). --Redrose64 (talk) 15:59, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Ahhh, actually that does look like precisely what I want. Thanks! Maury Markowitz (talk) 16:06, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Yes, works perfect. Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:51, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

SNFref outside a cite?

I love SFN. I hate CITE. So I use SFN to point to normal text-based bib entries. However, this leaves the SFN linked to a non-existent anchor. I would like to fix that. So I did this. What did I do wrong? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:48, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

@Maury Markowitz: {{sfnref}} doesn't set an anchor, it allows an anchor to be defined which matches the one that {{sfn}} is expecting. What you can do is feed that into {{wikicite}} through its |ref= parameter, and put the unformatted ref into the |reference= parameter, like this. More at my post at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 106#Complex template edit request. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:57, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
Got it, but I'm not sure I prefer that format any more than CITE. Is there any simpler syntax to achieve the same thing? Or perhaps there should be an "anchor" flag and I should suggest that somewhere? Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:08, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
{{anchor|{{SfnRef|Stephens|1989}}}}Mark Stephens, [http://books.google.ca/books?id=GzoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT15 "OSI Layer 3 Differentiates System Software"], ''InfoWorld'', 6 March 1989, p. 15.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:14, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I've just found Template:Sfn#Citation format does not support anchors: .7B.7Bwikicite.7D.7D.
You could use {{anchor|{{SfnRef|Stephens|1989}}}} which would work almost as well. The thing about {{wikicite}} is that when you click on the link that takes you there, the whole of the text enclosed by that {{wikicite}} is highlighted in pale blue (except in Internet Explorer); {{anchor}} won't give you the blue highlight. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:16, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Edit toolbar

What is the best method of adding buttons to the Vector enhanced Edit toolbar? --  Gadget850 talk 22:31, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Check out mw:Extension:WikiEditor. It has a section called Toolbar_customization and there's a link in the "See also" section to mw:Extension:WikiEditor/Toolbar customization. I found this documentation very difficult to use in practice when I last tried to use it a couple years ago but you can get simple things done with determination. Cheers, Jason Quinn (talk) 01:01, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
I saw that but it looks specific to WikiEditor. --  Gadget850 talk 11:44, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
@Gadget850: The enhanced toolbar and WikiEditor are the same thing as far as I know. --V111P (talk) 22:11, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Editing

It is really hard to edit an article using a mobile devise (i am using my ipad),because the whole thing just goes blank and you can only type and expect it to be correct. (I am not good with describing.) And there is no "undo edit" button. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Annonymus user (talk • contribs) 21:26, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata licensing triples

We (BBC/Jisc/BUFVC partnership) have a LOD crawler which processes and indexes permissively-licensed Linked Open Data, provided it is explicitly marked as being such (i.e., the crawler ignores any data which either isn't LOD, or we can't successfully determine is permissively-licensed). More info here.

Currently, requests for Wikidata entities jump through 303 chains — one to disambiguate the IR/NIR, and one for content negotiation. While there's nothing about this that the crawler can't deal with (it does, as it's not an uncommon pattern), it means we end up with this, when requesting Turtle, for example:

1. Fetch http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1 (303 See Other) 2. Fetch https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q1 (303 See Other) 3. Fetch https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q1.ttl

Within this graph, which has a URI of https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q1.ttl, there are triples describing the licensing of the data. However, the subject of those triples is the conceptual document (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q1), not the concrete serialisation (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q1.ttl): 

 data:Q1
    schema:version 160817834 ;
    schema:dateModified "2014-09-30T17:59:49Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    a schema:Dataset ;
    schema:about entity:Q1 ;
    cc:license <http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/> .

As there are no triples relating to the specific serialisation, it's not possible to reliably evaluate the licensing status of https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q1.ttl. Unfortunately, the fact that there was an inbound 303 to it from a URI which does have licensing data is not sufficient to be able to reliably do this (it's inference of a relationship which isn't sufficiently described in the data and which manifests differently in different datasets).

Therefore, can I ask devs to consider adding triples to each RDF serialisation whose subject is the serialisation-specific URL, and either (or both!):

  • Replicates the cc:license predicate/object which are emitted for the abstract document

or

  • Indicates that the serialisation is a concrete representation of the abstract document (perhaps with dct:isFormatOf)

My preference is strongly towards the former, but expressing the relationship between the abstract and concrete documents may be desirable in any case, and could provide enough data to infer properly the licensing status of the graph without false-positives arising elsewhere.

Many thanks!

Nevalicori (talk) 08:34, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

If you are specifically after Wikidata, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Contact_the_development_team might be a better place to bring this up. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:20, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks -- I was directed here in error, shall post over there! Nevalicori (talk) 10:27, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

Hiding minor edits in contibs list?

Is it possible to fetch or display only non-minor edits in Special:Contributions, either by gadget or javascript workaround? I have a lot of semi-automated Twinkle reversions, plus some other various minor edits, and I'd like to be able to hide those to see what the rest of my contributions look like. It's possible that there's already something in the gadgets or preferences that I'm just not seeing. Thanks. --Bongwarrior (talk) 20:48, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

  • It could be done with jQuery in a couple lines of code, or it could be added to the core code for the page. Doing it with jQuery would hide all of the one that weren't minor, which might leave you with none on the page; whereas, doing it in the core code (not too hard, we recently added the checkbox for "new pages") would return a new page with just minor edits. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 21:23, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
Sounds good, but I want to hide the minor edits, not display only minor edits. Also, I forgot to mention that the watchlist (or, at least, my watchlist - not sure if it's standard) already has this feature. --Bongwarrior (talk) 21:33, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Same decision. You want to remove the minor edit (reducing the edits listed on page potentially to none) or do you want a full list of edits with no minor? .js v .php. There is a watchlist gadget (that you're likely using) that removes them on the watchlist but not on contribs or rc (if you look at rc). — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:16, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Layout Issues

Hey everyone, hope all is well. So I have had a problem today with wikipedia's layout on Google Chrome. For some reason, all infoboxes are on the left side instead of the right, the lead section is underneath the infobox instead of being adjacent and the VTE boxes are all messed up as well. Interestingly enough it only happens on Chrome (I logged into my account on Safari and everything was normal) and only when I'm on English wiki. I don't think I changed my preferences or did anything to change the settings. Anybody know what's wrong? Is it just something with my browser that I need to troubleshoot? Thanks for any help! Rupert1904 (talk) 03:43, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

One possibility is that the stylesheet only partially loaded, for some reason (or that you happened to load a broken stylesheet while someone was experimenting with it). Try following the instructions at WP:BYPASS to bypass your cache, to see if that fixes the problem. If not, something is probably more generally broken and this might need looking into more closely. --ais523 11:02, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
Hey ais523, you were right, thanks for the help! It was a problem with cache, so I just deleted it and now everything seems to be in order. Rupert1904 (talk) 15:15, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Irrelevant tags

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T73947

Why would this edit get tagged with copyright violation template removed and speedy deletion template removed if the edit did not remove the templates? Is this a bug in the tags system? The user used HHVM and VisualEditor, is this relevant? 109.79.177.119 (talk) 09:43, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Impossible to tell just like that, but something is definitely amiss here. If you review the page history a bit (which I managed to do before it was deleted), the two templates were indeed removed at a point (and that was correctly tagged) and then restored, with the next edit being tagged incorrectly. I'd rather suspect AbuseFilter (the tagging system) instead of VE or HHVM – there were some issues with incorrect tagging in the past – but who knows.
You can examine the logic that led to that edit being tagged at Special:AbuseFilter/examine/log/10945503 – if you look at the row described as "Unified diff of changes made by edit", you can see that AbuseFilter really thinks these tags were removed in that edit (although they were not). I filed this as T73947 Matma Rex talk 10:36, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
Admins can see the page history at Special:Undelete/M.R. Organisation Limited. I also see two diffs with tags "copyright violation template removed, speedy deletion template removed". The first edit did remove them but not the second by the same user two hours later. Other tags in the two edits were not identical so it wasn't the complete tag sequence which was duplicated. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:50, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

"Tag: Mobile edit" and erroneous edits

It seems whenever I see a tagged "mobile edit", that the edit results in an erroneous saved page. Such as [1] where either the top of the page is replaced with the new material, or the entire page is replaced with mobile edit material. Is this something to do with the way mobile edit works? -- 67.70.35.44 (talk) 12:41, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

That appears to be user error, rather than any problem with the mobile editor. Jackmcbarn (talk) 13:30, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
  • It's not a user issue. The mobile editor is horrendous and many of the editing gadgets cause issues when mobile editing. #Editing above likely related. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:10, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
    Normal gadgets do not run on mobile unless explicitly enabled. I don't see any on enwp that do. Legoktm (talk) 20:03, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Enormous blue search button

The search button on the contibs page is now big and blue, and it's one butt-ugly monstrosity in my opinion. Any chance we could switch it back, and possibly refrain from any future attempts at Facebookization? --Bongwarrior (talk) 20:07, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

I noticed this on Wikidata yesterday or the day before which really hacked me off. This change really does imitate facebook. Jared Preston (talk) 20:11, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
It's utterly egregious and out of keeping with the rest of the interface. William Avery (talk) 20:16, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
The cynic in me says that after the MediaViewer debacle, someone at the WMF is trying to slip Athena through in gradual instalments. Mogism (talk) 20:23, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
See mw:Wikimedia Foundation Design (outdated) and mediawiki.ui. In time, all buttons and controls will have this style. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 20:27, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
From the sounds of it, many if not most users were initially surprised to learn that there was a Commons file page link button at all because it had little contrast. There may be a better way to indicate to users that it is there, but until this way is presented, no changes should be made, and simply changing it back would not be helpful in my opinion. Also, unless some very drastic changes have been made since the last time I saw a Facebook page (it has been a while, emphasis on has), I don't recall the site having any association with high-contrast buttons. Dustin (talk) 20:35, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
FYI: I had to purge the page to see what this was about. --  Gadget850 talk 20:42, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
The HTML for the button changed from <input class="mw-submit" value="Search" type="submit" /> to <input class="mw-submit mw-ui-button mw-ui-progressive" value="Search" type="submit" /> so it gained the mw-ui-button mw-ui-progressive classes. From what I can find out with my browser's "Inspect element" feature, it's two new CSS rules with a whole bunch of declarations:
.mw-ui-button.mw-ui-progressive,
.mw-ui-button.mw-ui-primary {
    background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #347BFF;
    color: #FFF;
    border-width: 1px medium;
    border-style: solid none;
    border-color: #347BFF -moz-use-text-color;
    -moz-border-top-colors: none;
    -moz-border-right-colors: none;
    -moz-border-bottom-colors: none;
    -moz-border-left-colors: none;
    border-image: none;
    text-shadow: 0px 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
}
.mw-ui-button {
    font-family: inherit;
    font-size: 1em;
    display: inline-block;
    padding: 0.5em 1em;
    margin: 0px;
    box-sizing: border-box;
    background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #FFF;
    color: #555;
    border: 1px solid #CCC;
    border-radius: 2px;
    min-width: 70px;
    vertical-align: middle;
    text-align: center;
    font-weight: bold;
    cursor: pointer;
    transition: #3A6EA5 0.1s ease-in-out 0s, color 0.1s ease-in-out 0s, box-shadow 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;
}
All we need to do is work out which of those we need to alter, then we can show people what to drop in their Special:MyPage/common.css. The background border and color ones, obviously. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:49, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi guys. This is my fault. I can assure you it was not a sneaky move. I and several others are refactoring the form interfaces across the Wikipedia site. We've been doing this behind a global but this one slipped through the net. It will restore to a normal button in a weeks time (you'll notice the button is no longer blue on mediawiki.org).

To give a tiny bit of background on the project, the goal is to describe forms semantically and consistently, to help newbies understand what the interfaces across Wikipedia do. In this case the contributions button is a progressive button which means that clicking it will not have any consequences to data. We are currently in a phase of code refactoring, but we plan to run this as an opt in feature to gather feedback.

If you are not a fan of the buttons, it will be very easy to remove the styles since they will all use a consistent selector e.g. mw-ui-button/mw-ui-progressive. It should also help gadget developers by giving them further clues about what different buttons do. I'm sharing this thread with the design mailing list so they are aware of your concerns. Thanks! Jon (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

I have to say, the idea of a big, high-contrast "delete" or "block" button sounds strangely appealing. But yeah, this should be it's own skin -- keep this stuff away from Monobook. MER-C 05:03, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for the explanation, Jon. --Bongwarrior (talk) 20:31, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
Jon, I think you missed a word: "We've been doing this behind a global" what? Nyttend (talk) 04:05, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
A global variable, specifically $wgUseMediaWikiUIEverywhere. Global variables are what MediaWiki currently uses for site configuration settings, though recently there has been some work on moving configuration into objects. PleaseStand (talk) 02:10, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
Yep sorry. Global variable. Writing from my volunteer account. I'm not actually sure why the styles are applying in MonoBook and I've asked why on a mailing list and if we should revisit any decision that was made there (i think it may be tied to the login form). I feel like MonoBook is the editors skin and stylistic changes there should be keep to an absolute minimum and only enabled when requested specifically by community members. The result of the change however would be that MonoBook could style these buttons differently across the site if wished. As stated the change should reset by Thursday and I feel this mistake has been enlightening and although accidental has provided useful feedback so thanks! Im hoping for a beta feature sometime this year and i hope youll be able to give us more feedback so this change can be seen as a useful one! Jdlrobson (talk) 22:06, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion for main space blocking tool option for admins

One of our users User:David Hedlund has suggested that wikipedia would benefit from a tool which would allow admins to block users from mainspace edits, but allow them to use talk pages and noticeboards. David is a problem user who has been blocked several times for disruptive edits, but to all appearances they are genuinely trying to improve the encyclopedia. I'm not protesting this block, or suggesting that if this tool is implemented that it should be applied to David, those are not discussions for this page. I am suggesting that a tool which allows users who have made disruptive mainspace edits to participate in community discussion would be useful for the community. That tool would serve to help those users with competence problems become productive editors and force them to learn the collaborative nature of Wikipedia. It would also serve as a possible halfway point in response to an unblock request where a user could actively show the community how they intend to interact with others in the future.Coffeepusher (talk) 14:04, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

We're not a rehabilitation center. If a user is not to be trusted with editing the encyclopedia, why would we want them here at all? – Juliancolton | Talk 14:10, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
I think that the collaborative aspects of the encyclopedia is one of the most difficult things to master, and also the foundation of all edits we do here. So if a user is willing to collaborate, and does bring a knowledge and skill set to the encyclopedia, then I think that allowing them to share their suggestions while at the same time limiting their access to mainspace edits will improve the encyclopedia more so than kicking them off the project entirely. We already see this form of editing in use with page protection, and that has proven to be a useful tool.Coffeepusher (talk) 14:31, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
If this is a good idea (which I'm not convinced of), and if we get consensus for it, we could do it with just a config change. When/if we get consensus, I'll prepare the change. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:36, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you @Juliancolton: and @Jackmcbarn:, I'm interested in what the community thinks about this and do understand that there are very real concerns with opening an additional level of access to problem users, but I believe that it will improve the encyclopedia.Coffeepusher (talk) 15:19, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
  • I'd personally oppose this change. Just because a user is blocked from editing on this wiki, does not mean they are blocked on all projects. The current way for a user to demonstrate that they get it is for them to constructively edit and communicate in another MediaWiki community (commons, mediawiki wiki, wiktionary, whatever). Once they have done that for awhile (time may vary depending on multiple factors), then they can come back and request an unblock on their talk page citing the work and community acceptance they have gotten working on the other project (they might even find they enjoy the other work more and decide to stay there, and as bad as we need good editors here, most of those other projects need them more). This proposal seems like an unnecessary convenience for those that come here with a wrong impression of enwiki. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:03, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
  • In my impression, this sounds helpful. It's easy for me to imagine someone who's getting into excessive conflicts while editing a certain article (or group of articles) while editing productively in categories and/or templates. We might as well block the person from editing articles instead of blocking him from editing everything. Nyttend (talk) 04:00, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
    • That's what topic bans are for. If they can't follow the rules and respect the topic ban and community discussion, they don't need to be editing. You might be able to convince me it's a good use case for PC2 though. Allows the article to be protected without preventing them from contributing in othe areas. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:23, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
      • Yes, a social solution: a technical solution is much simpler. Why would we want to prevent someone from helping in other namespaces? Building the encyclopedia is the ultimate goal, so if someone's unable to contribute properly to part of it and able to contribute properly elsewhere, we ought to prevent editing only to the "unable" part. Nyttend (talk) 20:58, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
  • If you get blocked for your behavior, what inclination should the community have to believe your behavior is different in other areas? A topic ban is one thing, because sometimes people can be overzealous. On the other hand, if you've been acting in a way to get you restricted from editing all of the main namespace, then there's an issue at hand that's more to do with editing, and I can't swallow that a user like that will be whipped into shape just by being unable to edit the mainspace. moluɐɯ 22:49, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
  • reply in this case the disruptive editing consisted of an overzealous editor who created too many articles that got deleted and had problems interacting with the community before doing major changes. Having them interact on the talk pages as an exclusive form of editing will allow editors to review their suggestions and act on them appropriately, while at the same time maintaining an editor who, in my opinion, genuinely wants to contribute but has a bit of an impulse control problem. As I have already stated the worst editors I have encountered were the one's who had thousands of mainspace edits, but few to none talk page edits. Mainspace campers are more problematic than those who learn to interact on the talk pages. Cheers! Coffeepusher (talk) 23:40, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Then it sounds more like a user who needs a binding moratorium than something that needs a technical limitation on. If a user can't respect a moratorium on a particular editing behavior of theirs, I'm not going to feel any inclination to cut them slack everywhere else. If he can't work cooperatively with others, he's WP:NOTHERE. moluɐɯ 18:28, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Diff number

Can anyone explain what happened here? (Check the tech note that follows the message). – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 17:13, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
PS. and why does this URL, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3ATestcases_page_header&diff=629082496&oldid=625450950, take us to the correct edit? Also, I have found that the only difference between the two bare URLs is the "prev" vs. "next" at the end, as in diff=prev&oldid=625450950 vs. diff=next&oldid=625450950. Use of the "next" takes one to the correct edit. PS left by – Paine 

Summary: Okay, first I used the {{Diff}} template with

Then I tried the bare URL

Both of the above have the same oldid as my edit does: 625450950
Further checks showed me that if I used "next" instead of "prev" in both the URL and the Diff template

These both take us to the correct edit. So the question is why both the previous edit and my edit seem to have the same oldid number? – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 18:45, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Paine Ellsworth: The numerical oldid codes correspond to specific page revisions, not to diffs. There are several different ways of linking to a diff page: &diff=next&oldid=X shows the difference between revision X and the succeeding revision, while &diff=prev&oldid=X compares X with the preceding revision. See Help:Diff#Linking to a diff. SiBr4 (talk) 18:47, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you, SiBr4! So this says to me that it is normal and natural for two diffs to have the same oldid number, as they will have different diff numbers? This is way beyond my ken, as one would expect as you said that "The numerical oldid codes correspond to specific page revisions," so that each revision should have its own oldid number – yet apparently this is not so (at least not for the most recent edit and the previous one). – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 19:26, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
oldid, which refers to a revision, is basically specifying one of the revisions you're comparing. So we can say "compare oldid 625450950 with the next edit to the page", or "compare oldid 625450950 with the previous edit to the page". These are each sensible descriptions of a diff, but they refer to different diffs; one of the revisions being compared is the same, but the other one is different. --ais523 19:40, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
I appreciate your response, ais523, and I'm beginning to appreciate the inherent complexities of the URLs, the diff numbers and the oldid numbers, complexities which before this I took for granted. I'll just have to be more careful of the terms I use in the Diff template from now on. Joys! to all – Paine  02:52, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

The Teahouse's ask a question script is broken

Some more detail at Wikipedia talk:Teahouse#Bottom posting. Teahouse questions are mostly placed through a script that places an "ask a question" button at the top of the page. It's not working. If someone could look into this that would be great. Some pages that might give a headstart to anyone looking: {{TH question page}}, Wikipedia:Teahouse/Question-form2 and Wikipedia:Teahouse/All subpages. Thanks--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 19:39, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Fixed! See Wikipedia_talk:Teahouse#Bottom_posting. - J-Mo Talk to Me Email Me 20:13, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

How to fix use of old script here?

In "India article statistics" on Wikipedia:WikiProject_India the numeric hyperlinks are all broken -- How do I fix it? The intended functionality is working properly onWikipedia:WikiProject_United_States page. --AmritasyaPutraT 14:47, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

The tested links all worked for me. Can you give an example link which doesn't work for you? The links are transcluded from User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/India which has not been edited since June. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:38, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I think the problem is that User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/India hasn't been updated since 12 June. This is in common with many other similar tables. The bot which updates it is WP 1.0 bot (talk · contribs), which isn't actually broken, because the tables for some WikiProjects are being updated. The updating seems sporadic though, check the revision history for User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/Australia. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:46, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-42

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

Recent software changes

Problems

  • 10% of Tool Labs was down on October 7. [4]
  • Tool Labs was also broken on October 11. [5]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf3) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 9 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 14 October, and on all Wikipedias from 16 October (calendar).
  • 5% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [6]

Meetings

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

08:54, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Problem with Active users list?

Looking for usernames starting with "Albino" I get [10] which shows Albino 123, a puppetmaster, but not the socks Albino242 (talk · contribs), Albino252 (talk · contribs) or Albino222 (talk · contribs). Why is this? Dougweller (talk) 11:43, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

In the page header I'm seeing "You are viewing a cached version of this page, which can be up to 15 hours, 42 minutes and 37 seconds old", which would explain why these three are not shown. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:55, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
Sorry, didn't read down far enough, even though I wondered if that was the problem. That really should be up at the top. Thanks very much. Dougweller (talk) 14:06, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
They all show up now ("11 minutes and 47 seconds"). עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 18:17, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Moving interface Linkshere tool from (broken) tool server to third party

A discussion regarding using a third party site in the MediaWiki:Linkshere interface message has begun at MediaWiki talk:Linkshere, please see the discussion there. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 20:32, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Template:TOC limit does not work in mobile view

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T73726

I was working on trying to limit the size of the ToC as it competes with the two infoboxes on Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and I came to realize that that {{TOC limit}} does not seem to work as expected in mobile view. Take a look at this mobile view link here in mobile and desktop view and you'll see what I mean. I submitted a bug report to Bugzilla #71726 to see if there's anything that can be done to help get the desired results. It would also be nice if the TOC limit on mobile view can be set independently of normal view as well.~Technophant (talk) 03:07, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

The {{TOC limit}} template works by wrapping a normal TOC in a <div>...</div> which specifies an appropriate class, such as class="toclimit-3". The MediaWiki:Common.css file declares a CSS rule for those classes, but MediaWiki:Mobile.css doesn't. Since it's something that we have the ability to fix from our end, I don't think that it's a bugzilla matter. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:24, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
@Technophant: bugzilla:71726 has been marked "Resolved Wontfix". --Redrose64 (talk) 10:31, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
Right, we may want to add the same CSS classes to mobile.css as to common.css in order to get the template to work properly. This doesn't need support from MediaWiki itself. --ais523 10:34, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
I've produced a possible coding at User:ais523/mobile.css (it has to be different from the non-mobile view because the HTML layout is different). I'll go request that the edit's made; it should be uncontroversial. --ais523 10:48, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
And now the request's been submitted. We might want to continue this conversation over on the talk page for the site CSS, as the admins considering updating site CSS might not check this page. --ais523 10:57, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

protect?

[11]

  • 19:07, 5 September 2013 Trust Is All You Need (talk | contribs) protect

What does it mean?--GZWDer (talk) 06:38, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Remains of article feedback tool, it seems. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=571681315 --Glaisher (talk) 06:43, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
These unreadable log entries needs to be cleaned up.--GZWDer (talk) 07:47, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Weird log entry

Can someone have a look at [12]? I'm seeing this at the top: 

18:29, 19 October 2013 Innotata (talk | contribs) protect

This looks very strange and might be a bug of some kind. (pinging Innotata because they might know what this is?) --NYKevin 13:51, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Might it be from the Article Feedback tool? —innotata 14:16, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Getting Started edit tag

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74106

The "gettingstarted edit" tag is now shown as inactive on Special:Tags.

Since 10 October some edits still have been coming through with this tag, but only at about 5% of the previous rate. This has been the 8th most frequently used of all edit tags, and is of great value in WP:recent changes patrolling. It should not be de-activated without warning or explanation. Can it please be restored to full operation as soon as possible?: Noyster (talk), 17:54, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Not sure if that's intentional. Maybe Superm401 or Robmoen know... --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:26, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
I don't think you should be seeing those at all, except when the mw:Growth team is running an experiment with the mw:Extension:GettingStarted software. It's not a tag for new users; it's a tag to identify users that have been given a slightly different version of the software, such as the one described for mw:Onboarding new Wikipedians. I believe that they're a bit "between projects" at the moment, and today's a holiday for most of the WMF staff. It's likely that they'll have another one out before long. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:14, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
OK if the stoppage of GettingStarted is just a short-term blip, but if it's more than that I'd like the community to be told and the WP:GettingStarted page to be amended. This feature has been active for quite a few months and over 230,000 edits have been tagged as made through it. GettingStarted has aroused considerable discussion, showing that those of us who deal with new users and their edits have a legitimate interest in the experience they are offered: Noyster (talk), 11:54, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
The Growth team has been retired, so it's unclear if/when we'll be able to continue experimenting with new GettingStarted features. Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk) 23:56, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
This change is intentional. I've updated Wikipedia:GettingStarted (sorry, we should have done that before). Note that the tag was never solely for new users (it applied to all edits using a particular interface, but even when that interface was being offered to everyone, so not only for experiments), nor did it cover all edits by new users. After we added a new experimental feature (Task recommendations) which could be used by new and existing users (which initially did not support edit tagging), we later decided not to use edit tagging for any GettingStarted edits.
There is a separate core feature that shows only contributions from new users (if I'm reading it right, it shows the 1% newest users) at [13]. This applies regardless of what interface people use. But remember to focus on the edit, not the editor. New users do a lot of good work (even though they're learning the ropes), and everyone makes mistakes, new and old. Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk) 23:56, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for reply. I couldn't agree more: the ability to identify new editors is needed so that we can welcome and support good contributors, as well as to curb the vandals: Noyster (talk), 10:12, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
It appears that it is still tagging edits made by users with HHVM (a small minority, as you said, since HHVM is opt-in). This is bugzilla:72106.
Note, due to new WMF staff policy, I've split my work account off from my personal one. Going forward, User:Superm401 is now solely my personal account, and User:Mattflaschen (WMF) is my work account. (CCing User:Phuedx since he also worked on this). Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk) 23:56, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant to ping Noyster before. Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk) 23:57, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

User script suddenly not working any more

I use User:קיפודנחש/watchlistScout.js to alert me when something on my watchlist changes. It is supposed to run on page load and refresh every 60 seconds afterwards. For the past few days, though, I have been getting nothing from the script. All of my other scripts are working, I'm getting no errors on the javascript console, and it doesn't look like anything has changed in the code of the script recently (latest change was in 2012). Is there something else that may have changed site-wide that broke the script? Possibly an update to the API or something?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 02:34, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

I am probably wrongly guessing here as I cannot see any suspicious function calls, but the timing would fit with https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2014-September/000953.html --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 05:40, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing that out. That was probably it. The creator of the script changed something related to an ajax call in the script and fixed it. I guess the old method was recently deprecated. Thanks for the help!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 15:39, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Search&Replace on Edit page

Using Firefox 31 and Vector skin on my laptop (Windows 7), I cannot make this function work. If I move the box to the column on the left, it disappears upwards as the page scrolls down on subsequent "Searches", and sometimes the "Search" will not highlight the word wanted at all, and is erratic at best. This even happens if the box is centred in the middle of the page. What is going wrong? I obviously use full screen mode when doing "Search&Replace". --P123ct1 (talk) 16:01, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

For small portions of text when the edit window does not have a scroll bar of its own, the search & replace window will always move along with the main browser page. When there's a large portion of text in the editor forcing its own scroll bar you can hold your cursor above the edit window and use the mousewheel to scroll it up and down with the S&R window staying in place. As to missing search results, the search function is case-sensitive, so you will have to do a separate search for words beginning with an upper-case letter (that's why there is a tickbox "match case"). De728631 (talk) 18:14, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
I always use "match case", but it still happens. I can't hold the cursor and move the mouse wheel, as I only have a touchpad. I'm not sure how to hold the cursor with it and still move things. --P123ct1 (talk) 07:48, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

signature Icon not responding in IE11

After opening an edit window, the signature icon (labelled 'signature and timestamp') works when using Opera 24 as browser but not when using Internet Explorer 11. This edit made and signed using Opera as browser. --— Philogos (talk) 18:22, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

When deleting BLP-prods, reason is not filled in

After clicking "delete" for a page with a standard CSD or PROD template, the reason is automatically filled in for every case except BLP-prod, when it is necessary to select it from the drop-down list. This may be be a hangover from the days when BLP-prod had a ten-day wait time, but now that it is seven days like normal PRODs, could automatic fill-in of the reason be provided? JohnCD (talk) 19:21, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

@JohnCD: I've been looking into this, and {{prod blp/dated}} actually does automatically fill in a deletion reason if you click the delete link in the template. The reason is set to a default of "Expired PROD, concern was: unsourced BLP", which cannot be changed with a parameter. From your post here, it looks like you're not seeing this text. Can you tell us exactly which delete link you're clicking? Is it the one that appears after the text in the middle of the template that looks like "Expired [[WP:PROD|PROD]], concern was: unsourced BLP"? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:05, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
The usual way I delete anything - click "Delete" on the drop-down menu under "More" just left of the search box (Win7, FF33.0, Vector). That fills in the reason for CSDs and normal PRODs. JohnCD (talk) 11:48, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
@JohnCD: Ok, this should be fixed now. {{prod blp/dated}} was missing an HTML element with an ID of "delete-criterion", which is why the reason wasn't being automatically filled in. I've added the correct HTML, as well as doing some general template clean-up. I've also removed the default reason from {{prod blp}}, but existing BLPPRODs still have it, so for the next seven days you will see a lot of deletion reasons that look like "Expired [[WP:BLPPROD|BLPPROD]], concern was: All biographies of living people created after March 18, 2010, must have references." — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:24, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
That works, thanks - quick service! JohnCD (talk) 17:44, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

anchor template breaks → click in edit summary

I can no longer follow the → click in this edit summary. I had to move down the anchor template to make the → click in the edit summary work. Environment: Firefox 33, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 21:06, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

These links are always broken if there is a template in the heading. The subject of templates in section headings is under discussion at Template talk:Talk header#No links in headings. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:44, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Why am I seeing a notice in my contributions list at times?

At times right now, I'm seeing a notice in my contributions list that says:

Changes newer than [anywhere from 10 to 15] seconds may not appear in this list.

I've never seen this notice before, ever. It's only showing up at times, not all the time. Did a new build just go out recently? Gparyani (talk) 00:26, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

It looks like a simplified database lag message. –xenotalk 00:40, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Very old page creations show major problems in history / contributions

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T38976
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T36873

Probably a known issue, but here goes...

Looking at the earliest edits by User:Damian Yerrick (for no particular reason, was browsing some old edits), I noted that many of those had huge negative diff sizes (up to -100 kB). Looking e.g. at the oldest edits to PUSA ([14]), we see this edit indicated with -100 kB, when it actually doubled the size of the article. The reason for these strange numbers appears when you look at [15], and there click on the "diff" link next to these contribs. For this particular page, the diff you get is this, comparing a version of late 2009 to a version of late 2001. Here as well, mid 2010 compared to October 2001. Or here, May 2011 to September 2001.

I haven't been able to find a pattern (e.g. this happens after X edits to a page), and don't know yet if it only happens with very old edits, but it is not really good of course. But another result of this problem is that e.g. User:Swhite created the page Spam[16], but it doesn't appear in his contributions[17]!

Are these inconsistencies still the result of that major database crash in the early years (2002?), or is it a new problem? I have never heard of edits appearing in one history (article history), but not in another (contributions list), but then again I haven't heard everything ;-) Fram (talk) 09:48, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

@Fram: This sounds like it might be in Graham87's area of expertise. I see that he's also documented some of his work at User:Graham87/Page history observations. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:10, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. Hopefully he can shed some light on this, the section "Revision ID numbers" maybe relevant here, but he will be probably much better placed to judge this. Fram (talk) 11:16, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
The problem with erroneous byte differences in page histories is tracked as Bug 36976, and is indeed related to revision ID numbers, as they are used to calculate the previous and next revision of a page. The problem with missing contributions is tracked as bug 34873, and occurs because many older edits are stored with a user ID of 0; the reason for this is that the accounts of the affected usernames hadn't been created in September 2002, when the older edits were mass-imported into the Wikipedia database. Graham87 11:25, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
OK, thanks! I'm glad that they aren't new problems. Fram (talk) 11:33, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
Is it because I'm user 1? I've been confused with a mop bearer more than once. Anyway I clicked "next" on that edit and expected to see a revert. My, how Wikipedia has changed since then. --Damian Yerrick (talk) 23:31, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
@Damian Yerrick: Nope, it's because I've done so many imports of your edits from the Nostalgia Wikipedia and other places. Graham87 09:34, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Pages in category Section name

What is the technical Section name for what appears as 'Pages in category "Φ"' in read mode? In other words, how do I get this edit to work properly? Thanks   It Is Me Here t / c 14:50, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

I tweaked it to use {{anchor}} instead of the section header.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:30, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
The html source of the rendered category page contains:

<h2><a name="Pages_in_category" id="Pages_in_category"></a>Pages in category "CS1 errors: dates"</h2>

So the anchor name is "Pages in category". You had the right name but swapped the parameter order in {{sts}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:39, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
I have changed it with edit summary: use MediaWiki's anchor "mw-pages" instead of "Pages in category" which is an ugly hack added in MediaWiki:Category header so the link would fail in other user languages than the default en.[18] That hack can cause other problems and should probably be removed but I don't know whether we rely on it elsewhere. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:12, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

older version of the map

hello, I have uploaded a map for an article Im working on Yamhad.

the problem is that the infobox is showing an older version of the map, instead of showing this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamhad_and_Vassals.png its showing this ! : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/2/22/20141015123556!Yamhad_and_Vassals.png is there anyway to fix this problem ?--Attar-Aram syria (talk) 17:29, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

I purged the version in the article with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/Yamhad_and_Vassals.png/250px-Yamhad_and_Vassals.png?action=purge. It displays right now. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:57, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Why do time stamps use DMY regardless of what I set my preferences to?

In my preferences, I set my timezone to CDT (America/Chicago on the list), and so that properly converts the timestamps from using UTC to instead display CDT, but regardless of what date format I set it to use, it displays in DMY. What is the problem here? Dustin (talk) 21:43, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

It works for me at for example the history of this page.[19]. What is your date format setting at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering and where do you see DMY? If you mean in signatures then they are not software-generated but saved in the wikitext as UTC and DMY. The MediaWiki software does not change them according to your preferences. The English Wikipedia has added an option at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets: "Change UTC-based times and dates, such as those used in signatures, to be relative to local time". This changes the displayed time in signatures but is not supposed to affect the date format. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:51, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Just as through my preferences, date format in page histories can be chosen, and the display timestamp can be modified to work for a user's timezone, why can the date format of time stamps just be auto-converted? I don't particularly like DMY as it puts the least significant values before more significant values. I set my preferences at at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering to use MDY because that is what I am used to, but I also have tried out or used YMD on occasion, but neither actually change how the time stamps display for me, even though they change the date format of revisions on page histories. Dustin (talk) 16:05, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
The MediaWiki software only has built-in functions to change the display of times which are stored as database entries, for example edit times in page histories, user contributions, watchlists, recent changes. This display is controlled by Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. When you sign with ~~~~, the time and date is not stored as a database entry in a time field but as actual text in the wikisource of the page. That text can then be treated like any other wikitext. It is an editor at the English Wikipedia who created the gadget to identify times in wikitext and change the time zone display. If a user enables the gadget then MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition tells the software to run MediaWiki:Gadget-CommentsInLocalTime.js which loads User:Gary/comments in local time.js which is made by User:Gary. Your browser receives the original UTC time but the JavaScript then runs in your own browser and changes what you see. I'm not a JavaScript programmer and don't know whether it could be modified to get the date format from your preferences and also change that, or maybe a new gadget or user script created to do it so users can choose independently. If somebody writes the code then administrators can add gadgets with easy one-click enable/disable at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. Any registered user with the right knowledge can write and run their own JavaScript or import it from elsewhere by editing their own Special:MyPage/common.js. I don't know whether somebody has a script somewhere to change the displayed date format. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:06, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
With the Comments in Local Time script, you can set the date format with the instructions found here. Available date formats are DMY, MDY, and YMD. Gary (talk · scripts) 18:38, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Randomly logging out

Every time I open a new tab (and sometimes even if I don't), I randomly log out. Help? --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 22:39, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

By the way, I use IE 11. --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 22:43, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
@UserJDalek: try reloading; Works for me. --Mdann52talk to me! 16:38, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
It seems to work now. Thanks. --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 22:15, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Can someone make a list for me?

I'd like to better understand WP:LEADLENGTH—how we do it in actual practice, not just the theory on the guideline page. One way to address this, I thought, would be to compare our (old) advice against our (recent) WP:TFAs. Does someone know how to make a table (or spreadsheet, or text file) that has this kind of information, without having to do it all by hand?

Article name Number of characters Number of words Number of sentences Number of paragraphs Characters in the lead Words in the lead Sentences in the lead Paragraphs in the lead
Tropical Storm Kiko (2007) 6,050 965 50 6 1,010 160 8 1
Colorado River 67,400 11,100 510 82 4,425 716 34 4

I'd like to have this data for, say, the last 100 consecutive TFAs. Since my manual method is slow, and since eyeballing the text to remove section headings and ref numbers is doubtless sloppy, I'm really hoping that someone can come up with a fast, easy, automated method. It seemed to me that the WP:DYK script might be useful for the character counts, but that still leaves the rest.

If you can produce the list and also feel like doing the basic analysis for me (which of the whole-page numbers correlates best with which of the lead-only numbers?), then so much the better. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:59, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

  • If you are going to build a small task force to do this work (5 members, 20 articles), or cerate a sub-page under your user-page, you may call me in there. Thanks. --Tito☸Dutta 23:18, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
    • Umm, I might be able to whip up a script to do this automagically. I'll give it a shot.--v/r - TP 00:00, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
    • Thanks for the offer, Tito. TParis, I hope that the script works. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Improving article history

I think article history should more often than it does not show information is removed then added. For example, the first sentence is all I removed from Chess#Promotion here and it still treats it like I removed the whole thing and wrote something else. Blackbombchu (talk) 21:11, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

By 'history', you mean the diff, right? Try wikEdDiff. — HHHIPPO 21:22, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikimedia Tool Labs

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74104

I use a couple of wikimedia tool labs sites such as [20] to check my user statistics and [21] to check article statistics, bugs and such. They are really useful sites but for the last few days they have been down. I can't seem to find a place to report the sites being down and I was referred to here by the IRC help chat. I hope you can help and I appreciate you looking at my request. - SantiLak (talk) 22:08, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

See bugzilla:72104. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:52, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
I appreciate the help. - SantiLak (talk) 23:28, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
Is this why I keep seeing spinning donuts and the message Waiting for tools.wmflabs.org... most every time I read or update a page? Wbm1058 (talk) 23:30, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
User:Wbm1058/common.js contains
mw.loader.load('//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Hedonil/XTools/XTools.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
The loaded meta:User:Hedonil/XTools/XTools.js contains
importScriptURI("//tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/api.php?pageid=" + ...
I guess that's the cause. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:57, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
I see, thanks. That's probably one of the causes. Perhaps there's another one or more... Wbm1058 (talk) 00:25, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
I think the labs bug is the entire cause of the spinning donut and message about labs, if the Hedonil tool scrpt is loaded on the user's .js page. I've been getting it for several days. When it finally stops spinning, which seems to take forever, the Hedonil tool does not show at the top of the article page — Maile (talk) 14:47, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

What links here

Before October 16, when I type in a page for What links here, there would be no suggestion drop down list. Now there is. Usually, I know what exact article title I'm going to put in there. I don't need the dropdown list's help. Any way to disable it? (Don't completely remove it, I sometimes want it enabled.) The only way to disable it is to check box but that does it for the search box, too. I would like it to be kept for the search boxes but disabled (however I sometimes want to re-enable it) on the What links here. I did not find this in any tech news. A Great Catholic Person (talk) 05:32, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

[OAuth page] some internal links not working (e.g. Facebook)

There are several links on the OAuth page that are not rendering. Specifically, in the List of notable OAuth providers the links for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter do not show on the article view. What could be the cause of these links not rendering? Brylie Christopher Oxley (talk) 06:54, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Someone else mentioned a similar problem a few days ago over on ANI. It seems to come down to AdBlock Plus and Fanboy's Social Blocking List. They mentioned that it should be fixed now though, perhaps if you update the extension/list? Organics talk 12:34, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Did something happen to Ambox?

I am using Monobook, and all of the templates based on {{ambox}} such as {{POV}}, {{refimprove}}, {{FAQ}}, etc. are displayed in a strange manner. See this image. --benlisquareT•C•E 08:22, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

I don't see a problem in Monobook. Try clearing your cache. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:43, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Dark colour schemes and the interface between the system, browser and Wikipedia

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74188
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74192

I hope this is the right place to ask this question. This is the number one issue that stops me editing Wikipedia comfortably, and it's an issue that hasn't yet been resolved, due to its technical nature. There are issues with formulae, box quotes, transparency in images (e.g. chemical structure diagrams), and the list just goes on. Adding the the problems is the new software that is coming out through 2014-15 (Media Viewer, VisualEditor, etc.) which utilises set colour schemes which from my (poor) understanding are hard to change with CSS script. I haven't filed a bug report, because it seemed others already had for the exact same issue.

 
Poor contrast on flow forms, most probably due to system colour scheme.

One of my last sentences on that discussion page, "However, on Wikipedia, [the stylesheet is] already suitable for my daily use", has since been found to only be true for the reading of non-technical articles which didn't contain box quotes. It's very frustrating, in that it severely impedes my use of this amazing website.

The other annoying behaviour, which is related, is the actions of certain text-entry boxes. The new piece of software, Flow, is an example, as is the larger search box that pops up under the heading "Search results" when your search query isn't found. The text and text box are almost the same colour; really dark. This is probably caused by the interaction between the system and browser, but changing the browser's default colour settings isn't an option, because then everything else is unreadable. I don't know how to tell my browser to ignore my dark system colours on websites and use the default light ones (I've tried playing around with all the colour settings in Firefox already).

Another interesting observation is that the source editing form I'm using to write this is using the dark background too, but it uses the light-grey text from my system theme in tandem, meaning that reading the text is not a problem. Same with the buttons down the bottom. I'm not sure if perhaps the specific input boxes I'm having trouble with take information from the system for the background, but none for the text, which might just be set as an unchanging black?

If any of this doesn't make sense, I can post more screenshots.

I'm running Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon, with a dark colour scheme for my window manager. Firefox 33.0 is my browser.

Any help would be vastly appreciated. Thanks, Thennicke (talk) 13:24, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

The issue for the larger search box, and probably for other things such as flow, is that the WMF UX designers have fallen in love with using dark grey rather than black text all over the place but they're only overriding the text color and not the background color. This works fine with the default white, but for people like you who've set the browser to a different color scheme this causes problems. This should be filed as a bug if it hasn't been already. Anomie⚔ 14:45, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
Anomie⚔, I thought it was a bit strange that only the text should be set to a different colour; that explanation makes sense though. Thank you, I'll file that bug. The issue with Wikipedia's lack of support for dark colour schemes is obviously a much bigger task. Thennicke (talk) 15:29, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
Thennicke, you might be interested in my suggested Appearance and accessibility panel (see Wireframe/napkin-sketch illustration in particular) - feedback appreciated!. And thanks Thennicke and Matma_Rex for filing those bugs. Quiddity (talk) 19:49, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
I would also like light colored text on a black background, but gave up on it due to all the issues it seems to cause. If it would work, it would solve several problems. On my CRT monitor, light backgrounds require more electricity, generate more heat, cause more damage to the eyes, make flickering appear worse, and cause more electromagnetic interference. Depending on the technology, this may be true for various flat screen monitors, too. If the screen was white when you turn the monitor off, and LCDs were used to block portions of that white background, then Wikipedia's default white background would make more sense. StuRat (talk) 21:26, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
StuRat, check out User:Dodoïste/vector.css for a prototype skin. You and I are not alone in this issue; Axl mentioned it as well, for example, and there are definitely others. The main issues with this skin at the moment are as follows:
  • Interaction with the UI elements in the new beta software
  • Templates with user-defined colour schemes are also a huge issue
  • Mathematical formulae are unreadable
  • Box quotes are unreadable
  • There's a lot of generally ugly and incompatible stuff
Quiddity, that wireframe looks really good at the moment! I honestly don't have any suggestions to add, other than perhaps an "advanced" menu where every font size and UI element colour is customisable for people who find the defaults unsuitable. (e.g. a direct inversion of the default colour scheme, for me, is too harsh. Hence the greys used on User:Dodoïste/vector.css)
This dark colour scheme is certainly a critical feature for me and others, and it will obviously require a community effort, because it's such a big project. Too bad I can't code. Cheers to everybody here for their help! Thennicke (talk) 05:44, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for pinging me, Thennicke. For the benefit of other readers: I use the green-on-black skin to reduce background glare. However I am unable to view many diagrams properly—often the labels or lines do not appear. Also, I am not able to view the WP:GAN pages. As a result, I have stopped undertaking GAN reviews. Axl ¤ [Talk] 08:39, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Tearing its guts out

Here's another bit of enigmatic (for me, at least) template stuff:

The way that grouping should appear is as follows:

I actually came across a redirect that was tagged like that first link above. The separation of the innards of the {{Redr}} template doesn't happen if the external rcat, {{R to section}}, is removed. When the Redr is placed in the usual position on the third line (or even on the second line), then all is normal. I tried using other independent rcats and received mysterious results – {{R with possibilities}} gives the same puzzling separation, while {{R from subpage}} looks normal. Of course, I'd like to fix this so editors don't have to be concerned about where they position the templates on a redirect, but I have no idea where to start. Is there maybe an easy fix to the template(s) for this? Is this suitable for a bug report? – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 16:24, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been looking at this. The problem is that {{mbox}}-based templates only work properly if placed at the start of a new line, otherwise HTML Tidy screws with what's inside the box. In the case of Sandbox2, you've got a table inside a list item of an unordered list; in the case of Sandbox3, the table is after the unordered list. It often happens with {{edit protected}} - compare old version with fixed version; the only difference is the presence of a colon in the first one. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:16, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
No problemo, and thank you for your explanation! The colon works well to spoil Redr as well:
I'll note it in the documentation. – Paine  22:11, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Change in behaviour of Special:LinkSearch

It is possible to link Wikipedia pages in two ways: as an internal Wikilink, which shows in "What links here", or as an external link, which does not. In the past it was possible to use Special pages → External links search for such links. At the top of that page it shows MediaWiki:Linksearch-text, which advises "To search for external links to pages on this site, start with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/".

This no longer works. According to bugzilla:72185, this is because $wgRegisterInternalExternals is not switched on. But, this certainly used to work, so when was it turned off? Bawolff (talk · contribs) and AKlapper (WMF) (talk · contribs) both say that it was intentional. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:08, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

I believe it was turned off at about MediaWiki 1.16 (2010-ish). See rev:53104. Following the link to bugzilla:19637, this appears to be a performance optimization (I didn't realize that when I commented on the bug). User:SPringle (WMF) would be the one to ask if the performance concerns are still valid, or if it can be re-enabled. Bawolff (talk) 19:44, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

SSL 3.0 discontinued

Possibly only dozen people in the world noticed this, but in case any of them are wondering: it appears that SSL 3.0 was disabled yesterday on the Wikipedia secure server. If you try to login via https: (and of course no one passes login data over http:) and your browser has "SSL 3.0" enabled—oops! The initial error message was: 

 Error code: ssl error no cypher overlap

At the end of the day message changed to: 

 SSL protocol has been disabled.

This apparently unannounced change (I haven't seen any mention of it) is presumably due to a "critical flaw in SSlV3" — "POODLE" — discovered just last month.

Anyone encountering this problem should go into their browser settings and disable SSL 3.0. If you have really old browser, it's time to upgrade. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:23, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

If your browser has TLS 1.2, 1.1, or 1.0 enabled, those should be preferred (in that order) to SSL 3.0. As for announcements, see [22] Anomie⚔ 00:46, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Error when searching for template "a"

This query results in the error message "An error has occurred while searching: The search backend returned an error:". Other single-letter templates are found just fine, maybe someone should take a look at this. Paradoctor (talk) 08:56, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

When that happens, I try to get to the bare URL, as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:A. – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 14:31, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
It works when I enable "New search" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. I think New search is planned to become the default or only search and there is limited interest in using resources on fixing such problems with the old search. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:39, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
No sweat, it's just something I noticed and thought might be of interest. Paradoctor (talk) 17:45, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

FeaturedTopicSum

Can anybody work out what the "-2" in Template:FeaturedTopicSum is for? I've been trying to convert this template to Lua at Module:FeaturedTopicSum, because it will be used in Module:Article history, but I can't work out why the current template code is the way it is. The template takes a topic name as {{{1}}}, returns {{{2}}} if the topic is a featured topic, and returns {{{3}}} otherwise. Now, one of the featured topic criteria is that 50% or more of the articles in the topic are featured articles. This criterion is translated into the following template code: 

{{#ifexpr:{{PAGESINCATEGORY:Wikipedia featured topics {{{1}}} featured content}} >= ({{PAGESINCATEGORY:Wikipedia featured topics {{{1}}}}} + {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Wikipedia featured topics {{{1}}} good content}}-2)
|{{{2}}}
|{{{3}}}
}}

For a figure of 50% or more, I would expect the calculation to be "featured >= good + other", not "featured >= good + other - 2". Am I missing something here? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 18:11, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Also, I should leave a ping for User:Ucucha, who made the most recent edit to the template. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 18:12, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

My guess: "Wikipedia featured topics ... good content" and "Wikipedia featured topics ... featured content" are subcategories of "Wikipedia featured topics ...", so subtracting two from the {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Wikipedia featured topics {{{1}}}}} term ensures that these subcategories are not included in the article count. SiBr4 (talk) 18:49, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) It appears the reason for this adjustment is that the page:
  • Category:Wikipedia featured topics *
contains both category pages:
  • Wikipedia featured topics * featured content
  • Wikipedia featured topics * good content
I expect the "-2" is to adjust for this inclusion. A quick look at the first category in the list shows:
— Makyen (talk) 19:12, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
Indeed, see mw:PAGESINCATEGORY. An alternative would be to use {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Wikipedia featured topics {{{1}}}|pages}}, which doesn't count subcategories. — HHHIPPO 19:19, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
Aha, that makes sense. I was getting messed up because the equivalent code in Lua doesn't count subcategories. (Or more accurately, you can specify whether you want it to count pages, subpages, files, or all three.) Thanks, everyone. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 19:50, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
And looking at the PAGESINCATEGORY docs, I see that the parser function works that way as well. The option to specify pages only came in MediaWiki 1.20, though, which would be why the template didn't use it. The last update to the template was in 2010, and 1.20 was released in 2012. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 19:57, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Login problems on IE9 Vista

I'm currently having problems logging into my account using Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Vista. I'm having no problems using this wiki when not logged in, but when attempting to log in, I get a "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" error; any attempt to refresh quickly regenerates the error screen, as if it's not even trying to load the login screen. I really prefer to be logged into my account whenever possible, so it is possible to do something about this issue? Thanks. --76.92.210.183 (talk) 00:09, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Found out what was wrong. I didn't have a specific value turned on--I had "Use TLS 1.0" off when it should have been on ("Use SSL 2.0" and "Use SSL 3.0" were already on, anybody else who's going through what I went through might want to check those as well). Shouldn't have a problem logging on now...--76.92.210.183 (talk) 06:10, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
You were using SSL 3.0? See #SSL 3.0 discontinued, above. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:44, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Custom CSS

"Code that you insert on this page could contain malicious content capable of compromising your account. If you are unsure whether code you are adding to this page is safe, you can ask at the appropriate . The code will be executed when previewing this page."

This is shown when I preview the CSS page. "you can ask at the appropriate ." seems to be unintended and something is missing. I post here to make you aware of it in case you want to change it. Iceblock (talk) 01:06, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I see MediaWiki:Jswarning which says "Code that you insert on this page could contain malicious content capable of compromising your account. If you are unsure whether code you are adding to this page is safe, you can ask at the appropriate village pump". The text "village pump" is a link to this page, but it displays bold here instead because it's a link to the page itself. Are you sure you have nothing after "appropriate"? If you see a large space but cannot make out any text then it may be a textcolor versus background color problem on your computer. Try holding your mouse over the space. And did you copy-paste the text with your browser or retype it manually? PrimeHunter (talk) 01:24, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply! It's my fault, it was hidden because of some settings on my computer. I have resolved it. Iceblock (talk) 01:43, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Checking custom tables of contents

Does anybody know of an automated or partially automated way to check the accuracy of the table of contents on pages like List of birds of French Guiana? I've been checking them by clicking on each heading to see if it has a target, then generating a normal table of contents and visually comparing it to the list to see if any headings have been missed. It is tedious and there are hundreds of articles in the series List of birds of ... which I'm hoping to clean up. SchreiberBike talk 03:40, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Page in "edit" mode is broken

Page in "edit" mode is broken, left side navigation bar is pushed down, no WP logo. --Tito☸Dutta 23:22, 19 October 2014 (UTC) Here is a screenshot (use "zoom") --Tito☸Dutta 23:27, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Have you tried to clear your entire cache? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:52, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Creating a Help article

I would like to create an article named Help:Automatically generated reference list, and copy into it the information in this draft page, per the discussion at Help talk:Footnotes. But whenever I search for the not-yet-existing new page, I get "An error has occurred while searching: The search backend returned an error:". Does creating a page in the Help namespace require some kind of administrator privileges? – Margin1522 (talk) 02:32, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

@Margin1522: Nope, this looks like a search bug rather than a page creation bug. If you click on the link you've made above you should be able to create the page. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:47, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
Yes, this has unfortunately become a common error for the default search engine. At Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures you can choose "New search" which doesn't have the problem. Clicking the red link also works fine. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:50, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
Success! Thank you both very much. Now I will go and select the new search engine. – Margin1522 (talk) 03:10, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
Another time, it would be more appropriate to WP:MOVE the draft to the new location. Doing so preserves the edit history, which is what is used to attribute the work and comply with the licensing model which Wikipedia uses. Even though it is (mostly) your work (there is one edit of the draft by BattyBot), preserving the edit history is one of the things that demonstrates that it is the work of the people credited in the history. Having a history that shows the development of the content is much stronger than having a fully formed version appearing in a first edit. — Makyen (talk) 06:05, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
Actually most of the content on that page was developed on the Help:Footnotes page. I just expanded it a bit and added some formatting and examples. I should have mentioned that in the edit summary. Now that you've reminded me, I will mention it on the Talk page of the new article. (The rest of the history on the draft page, including BattyBot, is for a completely different article, Bettina von Zwehl, which is why I copied it instead of moving it.) – Margin1522 (talk) 07:58, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
@Margin1522: If you made the new page by copying text from another page, WP:SPLIT applies and attribution is still required. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:13, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. There was a template {{Copied}}, so I added that. Essentially it duplicated information already on the talk page, but if there is a standard format it's better that way. – Margin1522 (talk) 22:05, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm signed in/I'm not signed in

On a computer with Firefox, for the past several months, if I accessed Wikipedia from a search engine after signing in, it would appear that I was not signed in (and my skin would be different). If I remained on Wikipedia after signing in and searched for the appropriate article there, I remained signed in. Another option was to use a link from an email containing "https:", which is not found in the URL of an article accessed from a search engine. Inserting "https://" before "en" fixed the problem. Now, the problem appears to have been fixed, although for some strange reason at home, where I have IE9, this happened to me once and I don't remember what I did. I actually never use search engines at home.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:50, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Edits cannot be made to Sankar Chakraborti

  Resolved

OTRS agent here, and was trying to make changes to the above article, but I definitely cannot edit it for some reason. While I can enter the edit window (edit source), I cannot submit changes. The button appears, but clicking on it yields no response. Any reason why this might be the case? I, JethroBT drop me a line 00:04, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

It works fine for me. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:09, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Also works for me. JethroBT posted more at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Editing and other functions disabled at Sankar Chakraborti. A tested null edit in Monobook gave me no problems. There are only three transcluded pages beyond those used in {{notability}}. Have you tried to clear your entire cache? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:55, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Works fine for me too. If you still have problems after clearing your cache, could you please specify if you can edit other articles? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:08, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Clearing the cache worked, thanks. I, JethroBT drop me a line 01:49, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Watchlist option when moving pages

When moving a page, one has an option to tick or untick the "Watch source page and target page" box. However, more often than not, I am finding myself in need of watching only the target (i.e., where the article is being moved to) but not the source (which will become a simple redirect). Is there a technical reason why the source and the target can't be unbundled into separate boxes? It's somewhat annoying to have to go through an extra step of going back and watching the target (if the box was not checked during the move) or unwatching the redirect (if the box was checked). Surely I'm not the only one feeling so?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 17, 2014; 14:03 (UTC)

Watchlists can have thousands of entries and redirects are rarely edited so I don't see a problem in adding the redirect to the watchlist. Maybe some users would like the option but it doesn't seem significant enough to clutter the interface and ask for developer work. Note that if others move a page on your watchlist then the new title is also added to the watchlist without removing the old title. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:49, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
I have no problem with the old title being kept on my watchlist when others move a page—in this case retaining the redirect in the watchlist actually helps see that the article has been moved, especially if consequent edits are done to the target before the move is seen on the watchlist. But keeping unnecessary (to me) records of redirects on my already overly long watchlist does not seem to be useful at all. If I kept every such redirect, my watchlist would not be just difficult to edit (as it is now, with 14,000+ entries and counting), but extremely so (I did have browsers on older PCs crash and hang when trying to open my watchlist in edit mode). And just how much of developers' time would splitting the option in two take, anyway? Ten, fifteen minutes? :) And if both options ("watch source", "watch destination" are placed on the same line, the cluttering is going to be minimal. Come to think of it, the "leave a redirect behind" seems a lot less useful than what I'm proposing. Yes, occasionally there is a need to suppress the creation of a redirect when moving a page, but does that really happen so often we need a separate option for that? Anyone else cares to chime in?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 17, 2014; 17:11 (UTC)
"leave a redirect behind" is only seen by admins. I often use either option there. Non-admins only have one checkbox on the move form. Many of them may not realize that anyone can change the redirect, and watching the source will inform them of such changes. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:35, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
The ability to suppress redirects by unchecking the "leave a redirect behind" box makes some history merges and swaps much much easier, and I would vociferously object to the removal of that check box. Graham87 08:52, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
Well, OK, I'm not here to advocate the removal of that box; it's just something that came up during the discussion (I personally don't care either way). Any opinions on the proposed split of the "Watch source page and target page" box, though?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 21, 2014; 20:09 (UTC)

Creation of the "Special talk:" namespace

Template:CoNo to speedily insert <code><nowiki>...</nowiki><code> markup

For your coding pleasure, try out {{subst:CoNo|1=your code here}}.

This has been a bit of a wiki-Grail of mine for years, because I hate manually typing out "<code><nowiki>...</nowiki><code>" all the time. {{CoNo}} stands on the shoulders of the giant Zenexer, whose {{Nowiki}} finally makes this work.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  23:30, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Glad to see my coding hacks put to good use! I wish I could remember who taught me the trick that I used, but it was a long time ago. —Zenexer [talk] 00:07, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Not to take anything away from anyone here but isn't simple stuff like this the reason User:s can add their own toolbar of useful/repetitive "inserts" using the CharInsert gadget via one's common.js file? Once in place there is no need to type anything - just highlight the target text and select the tags from your custom menu of stuff.

For example; if you add the following to your common.js file....

/* CharInsert specific */
window.charinsertDontMove = false;
window.editToolsRecall = true;
window.charinsertCustom = { User: ' |  =  {\{+}}  [\[+|]]  —  Æ  æ  Œ  œ  <code><nowiki>+</nowiki></code>  {\{ping|+}}' };
if(window.updateEditTools) window.updateEditTools();
... A new menu labeled "User" containing your custom inserts will appear in the menu of CharInsert (EditTools). Hope that made sense -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:38, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
There is a suggestion at MediaWiki talk:Edittools#Individual customization? to add it for everybody like meta already does. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:47, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
This doesn't actually work. For example, {{subst:CoNo|~~~~}} generates a nowiki'd version of my signature wrapped in <code> tags, rather than 4 ~s. For this functionality to work, it would have to be done in JavaScript in the edit window, rather than in the parser. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:27, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Inserting <code><nowiki></nowiki></code> can already be done - but in two clicks, not one. Make sure the dropdown menu below the edit box set to "Wiki markup" rather than "Insert"; I never leave mine on "Insert", because everything in there is also available in "Wiki markup". --Redrose64 (talk) 07:30, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Some of our sister projects have a single button for this; could we not do so also? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:35, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Ideally, would this be <kbd> or <code> tags in most cases? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:46, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

This will add a button to the edit toolbar. --  Gadget850 talk 21:31, 23 October 2014 (UTC) 

if ( typeof $j != 'undefined' && typeof $j.fn.wikiEditor != 'undefined' ) {
	$j(document).ready( function() {
		$j( '#wpTextbox1' ).wikiEditor( 'addToToolbar', {
			'section': 'advanced',
			'group': 'format',
			'tools': {
				'code nowiki': {
					label: 'CodeNowiki',
					type: 'button',
					icon: 'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Button_code_nowiki.png',
					action: {
						type: 'encapsulate',
						options: {
							pre: "<code><nowiki>",
							post: "</nowiki></code>"
						}
					}
				}
			}
		} );

	} );
}

Tech News: 2014-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. You can read translations.

Recent changes

  • You can test a new system to see math using MathML. Go to your display options and choose "⧼mw math mathml⧽".
  • You can add badges in Wikidata for quality articles and featured lists. [23] [24]

File information cleanup

Problems

  • Developers fixed a security problem. If you use Internet Explorer 6, you won't be able to log in any more. You should use a newer browser. [26]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf4) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 21, and on all Wikipedias from October 23 (calendar).
  • 10% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [27]
  • If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category. [28] [29]

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

13:48, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Duplicate parameters

The tracking category will be set by MediaWiki:Duplicate-args-category and defaults to Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls. Duplicate parameters will only put the page into the tracking category. It will not mark the specific template, so it will take some digging to figure out the duplicates. --  Gadget850 talk 01:08, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Also, the report uses the present tense, but actually this feature isn't yet active on enwiki. It should start working on 23 October. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:00, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
The category is starting to fill up now. Some of the problems were with the templates themselves, such as Redirect template or Navbox subgroup. -- WOSlinker (talk) 21:08, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
Too bad there is no provision for an error message to show where the problem is. --  Gadget850 talk 21:10, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
@Gadget850: I've submitted gerrit:168607 which will add one. Jackmcbarn (talk) 16:13, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
I've found that it also detects cases where a positional parameter is used in both unnamed and named forms, see the revision prior to this fix. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:17, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
If a page uses WP:LDR, and one or more of the refs inside the {{reflist|refs=...}} is not used within the main text, the page is put in Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls for some reason (the error message Cite error: A list-defined reference named "..." is not used in the content (see the help page). is generated as before). --Redrose64 (talk) 19:42, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
@Redrose64: That's because of an error in our local modifications to MediaWiki:Cite error references missing key. I've submitted an edit request to have it fixed. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:06, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
which I have now actioned, thanks. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:28, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

This category has considerable potential as a tool for tracking down errors. I think it would be more useful with two enhancements:

  1. An error message is needed. It looks like that has been requested above.
  2. As we do with Citation Style 1 errors, pages in the Draft, User, and all Talk namespaces should show the error messages but should not be included in the error tracking categories, since those pages should not be subject to cleanup. See this discussion for more details.

Should we move this discussion to a more relevant location, like Category talk:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls?

If you're working on cleaning up these errors, I recommend starting with templates, since fixing them will remove articles containing those templates from the category automatically. Here's a catscan query for templates in the category.– Jonesey95 (talk) 21:52, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I have fixed about 30 of these templates. There are currently about 20 left. They are (and were) mostly Navboxen. Some of them appear to have a redundancy in the |state= parameter that I do not know how to fix. Others are very long, and it might be easier to just wait for the error message to appear once that patch is deployed. Still others are a mystery to me. Happy hunting! – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:47, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
I'd oppose such a change to categorization. If you only want to see certain namespaces, then just query the category for those namespaces. There's no good reason to hide certain pages with errors from everyone, just to save a few people from having to filter the results themselves. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:10, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
I've fixed up three navboxes so far, their problems were different: Template:Dundee F.C. matches; Template:Copa Libertadores seasons; Template:Football in Lithuania. What is this "redundancy in the |state= parameter"? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:28, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Here are a few that I haven't been able to figure out a fix for: {{Crimea topics}}, {{Faroe Islands topics}}, {{CanadianTerrorism}}, {{Northern Ireland topics}}, {{Netherlands topics}}. Some of them appear to have |state= duplicated, after a fashion, but there may be something else going on as well. More templates are populating the category as the database is refreshed, or whatever it is doing. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:37, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Template:CanadianTerrorism was an easy fix. The problems with the other 4 are caused by Template:Country topics, which is not simple to fix. I'll try to fix it in the next day or so. Jackmcbarn (talk) 04:46, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
I've fixed {{Country topics}} with this edit. -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:09, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
{{Nsnavbox}} may need a similar fix. There is a whole bunch of conditional list and group numbering that may be unnecessary. It's too intricate for me to trust my editing skills. Another one that is causing a number of templates to show this error is {{Don't edit this line}}. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:03, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
I've done this in the sandbox for Nsnavbox, which might work but needs further checking. -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:38, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
The good news is that when the problem is in the template itself, not in the way that it is used in an article, the template is now listed at Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls, for example Template:Nearest star systems is shown here.
The bad news is that I don't know of a good fix for the problems in that navbox. What it does is to bring in between 0 and 15 child navboxes, such as {{Star systems within 0 – 5 light-years}} and {{Star systems within 70 – 75 light-years}}. Those that it wants to display are put in |list2= |list3= etc. to |list16=, and since these are valid {{navbox}} params, they display. Those that it doesn't want to display are assigned to the undefined |list= parameter, which is why the template ends up in the error cat. I want to fix it by doing this, but it blows out the template include size. Is there a better way? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:43, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I'm off to bed now so I don't have time to check it properly, but would this kind of thing do the trick? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:47, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
@Mr. Stradivarius:   Thank you that works. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:09, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

There are perfectly good reasons to use duplicate parameters and so I think that this needs more discussion before any more templates are changed. -- PBS (talk) 15:38, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

There are a lot of pages showing up in the category that do not have duplicate parameters. Many of them are showing up in the category but the category isn't showing up on the page itself... There's something wrong here... — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:50, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
Probably because they were using a template that had a duplicate parameter, but the template has since been fixed. Have you tried a null edit on the articles to see if they are removed from the category? -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:52, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
Help:Job queue. For example, yesterday I made this edit. Around 50 pages like 1901 in India didn't drop out of the cat immediately; but when I looked again 12 hours later, they'd all gone. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:47, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
Of course I've done null edits (which is why the category doesn't show on the page)... I also did a purge. Has nothing to do with the JQ (or the null edit / purge would've fixed it), something else is not WAI here... — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 19:50, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
Please give examples of pages that won't drop out of the cat. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:06, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
A purge only updates the purged page and not the categories it is in. Template edits can also cause a category to be removed from a page without the page being removed from the category until much pater. A null edit should update both the page and the categories right away but we need an example to see whether something is wrong. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:42, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
@PBS: There are no reasons to ever duplicate parameters. When do you think there are? Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:36, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
Background at Template talk:Cite EB1922#HIDE_PARAMETER. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:18, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Whac-A-Mole, and chess templates

Playing Whac-A-Mole with templates as they pop into the category, as well as trolling through articles looking for broken navbox templates, appears to be keeping the category in the 50,000-article range (articles are being added by the database refresh about as quickly as they are being removed).

The catscan query above shows a number of chess-related templates that I am unable to interpret or fix. Some of them invoke a Lua module, so they are not likely to blame. It looks like there may be a problem in one of the underlying templates shared by all of these templates, or else they all use the same techniques. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:41, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

It not actually a problem with the templates. It's the method used to call them. The documentation recommends the following format to use the templates:
{{Chess diagram
| tright
| 
|= 

 8 |rd|nd|bd|qd|kd|bd|nd|rd|=
 7 |pd|pd|pd|pd|  |pd|pd|pd|=
 6 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |=
 5 |  |  |  |  |pd|  |  |  |=
 4 |  |  |  |  |pl|pl|  |  |=
 3 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |=
 2 |pl|pl|pl|pl|  |  |pl|pl|=
 1 |rl|nl|bl|ql|kl|bl|nl|rl|=
    a  b  c  d  e  f  g  h

| The King's Gambit
}}
and it's the ='s bits that are the problem. It is passing over the blank parameter multiple times. You could rename those parmaters and it would then be ok:
{{Chess diagram
| tright
| 
|x1= 

 8 |rd|nd|bd|qd|kd|bd|nd|rd|x2=
 7 |pd|pd|pd|pd|  |pd|pd|pd|x3=
 6 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |x4=
 5 |  |  |  |  |pd|  |  |  |x5=
 4 |  |  |  |  |pl|pl|  |  |x6=
 3 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |x7=
 2 |pl|pl|pl|pl|  |  |pl|pl|x8=
 1 |rl|nl|bl|ql|kl|bl|nl|rl|x9=
    a  b  c  d  e  f  g  h

| The King's Gambit
}}
or remove them alltogether:
{{Chess diagram
| tright
| 
|rd|nd|bd|qd|kd|bd|nd|rd
|pd|pd|pd|pd|  |pd|pd|pd
|  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  
|  |  |  |  |pd|  |  |  
|  |  |  |  |pl|pl|  |  
|  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  
|pl|pl|pl|pl|  |  |pl|pl
|rl|nl|bl|ql|kl|bl|nl|rl
| The King's Gambit
}}
but either of those methods would probably get lots of complaints. I think it would be better if the mediawiki code could be modified to ignore the blank parameter. -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:54, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
I recommend we switch to your second format, just removing the dummy parameters entirely. Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:35, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
I've just written User:Mr. Stradivarius/chessboardfix.js, which fixes chess template code in the edit window to look like WOSlinker's second example. Add it to your script.js, go to a page with a chess template invocation in edit mode, highlight the template code, and click on the "Fix chessboards" link in the toolbar (underneath "what links here"). The text should be replaced with a chess diagram without duplicate parameters. I've tested it on normal chessboard templates, and a few esoteric chessboard templates like 10x10 boards, bughouse chess, and Raumschach chess, and it seems to work ok. Results should still be checked manually, and you should be extra careful if you use it to select normal wikitext, as there is a chance it may mangle some of it. I've only tested it on Firefox, so it might not work in other browsers. Let me know if you have any suggestions for how to improve it, as I'm still pretty new to JavaScript and there are bound to be things that I could do better. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 08:26, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Further discussion on the Category Talk page

I have started a couple of new discussions about specific templates at Category talk:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls to reduce traffic about these minor errors on VPT. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:59, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

External link CAPTCHA, PMID, and protocol-relative URL

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T63556

If an anonymous editor adds an external link to a page, a CAPTCHA interface is normally triggered, this is to protect against spambots. In 2012, I suggested a whitelist for links that are never going to be used for spam. This was implemented in 2013, and is at MediaWiki:Captcha-addurl-whitelist.

One of the items on the list is nih.gov, which houses PubMed, and is linked to in Template:Cite journal when a PMID number is provided, and in Template:PMID. In the latter template (and I assume in the former as well), the link is in protocol-relative form, i.e. like so: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15988469. For me, this triggers the CAPTCHA interface, whereas http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15988469 does not. Is there any way to allow protocol-relative URLs in the whitelist? Or can anyone think of another way of remedying this in the templates? 137.43.188.126 (talk) 15:36, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

This is a bug in mw:Extension:ConfirmEdit, and is being tracked as bugzilla:61556. I don't see any activity at the bug page since it was filed back in February. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 16:05, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, Since there is seemingly no interest in fixing the bug, should the templates be changed? Is the benefit in using protocol-relative URLs in these templates such that using it would be the lesser of the two evils? 137.43.164.84 (talk) 16:33, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
It would be better to fix the bug, I think. All it takes is for one person to submit a patch (and for another person to review it and commit it to the repository). Any PHP coders in the house? :) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 16:46, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
I submitted gerrit:168074 to fix this. We definitely should not break external SSL for all our readers just to save new editors a little bit of hassle in the meantime. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:14, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
This will be fixed here on October 30th. Jackmcbarn (talk) 19:26, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Can't edit my /skin.js subpage

Pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. Also, it's stuck in "WikiText mode" (as opposed to "JavaScript mode"). For reference, I use IE 11. --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 05:09, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Works fine for me. You may want to try not using Internet Explorer. --(ʞɿɐʇ) ɐuɐʞsǝp 06:36, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
The tin doesn't say what goes wrong. Users with wikEd enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets sometimes have problems editing js and css files. The usual problem is that the edit box goes blank, and temporarily disabling wikEd on the icon   at the top right solves it. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:35, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: I don't have wikiEd enabled, and I can still see the text, I just can't edit it (sorry for not being clear before). Also, for some reason It now gets stuck in "JavaScript mode", and if I click "show preview", the box goes blank. --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 22:23, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Do you mean you can see the text in the edit box after clicking edit, but before clicking preview? Can you place a cursor in the edit box by clicking there? Do you literally mean "/skin.js" as in User:UserJDalek/skin.js. It should for you be a redirect to a page for your skin like User:UserJDalek/vector.js (others will redirect to "User:UserJDalek/theirownskin.js" which is an odd feature). What is your browser and skin? Can you create a css page like User:UserJDalek/common.css? PrimeHunter (talk) 23:00, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: To answer your first question; yes, it's exactly like that. For your second, no, it doesn't work. Third, no, I do mean my /vector.js page. Fourth, as I already said, I use Internet Explorer 11, and my skin is vector. Finally, no, I can't create the CSS page either. --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 02:50, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
OK. I have no problem in IE9 but cannot test IE11. Have you tried to clear your entire cache? Does https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:UserJDalek/vector.js&action=edit&useskin=monobook work? It would probably work to temporarily disable JavaScript in your browser but that can be cumbersome and doesn't allow you to test the code until you have saved and enabled JavaScript again. You can also ask an admin to edit the page if you don't think it will require many tweaks. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:27, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
It works now, but (for reasons I can't explain here), I'm now using a different computer that runs IE10. --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 22:26, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
Please ignore the above message, I'm back with the old computer, and yes, it works with MonoBook. --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 01:45, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Layout problems

May be something on my side only, but here goes.

At 2009 UCI Cyclo-cross World Championships (and other articles in the same series, like 2008 UCI Cyclo-cross World Championships or 2010 UCI Cyclo-cross World Championships, or related ones like 2007 UCI Track Cycling World Championships, but not on unrelated articles), I get ridiculously large "edit source" and "edit beta" links next to the title and section headers, and a "Jump to: navigation, search" link beneath the standard "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" line. At the bottom I get a line like "Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2008_UCI_Cyclo-cross_World_Championships&oldid=605376531" " and the categories in some strange huge box, one above each other, instead of next to each other.

Any ideas? Fram (talk) 09:17, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

I don't see this. But I have seen it on about two other pages in the last month. I suspect a server issue. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:39, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
It's gone for me now a well, someone has super-rapidly corrected the error (or, more probably, it is some server issue indeed). Fram (talk) 09:59, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
The sometimes visible "Jump to: navigation, search" is also discussed at Talk:Main Page#Did something change? I can see it in Firefox with the procedure there: Click on "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" and then press Tab. Or by just pressing Tab three times (more if there is a banner). The html source of rendered pages also says <div class="printfooter">Retrieved from ...</div>. Maybe people see these messages if their browsers don't load classes supposed to hide them by default. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:32, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: A visible "Jump to: navigation, search" is not the main problem here, which is a font size of approximately 150% on certain elements plus a malformed cat box. The latter I suspect is due to the styling of the hlist class going missing. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:48, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Get list of edited articles

Is it possible to get list of every Wikipedia article, I contributed to? I don't mean the Contributions page where every edit is present but a list of every article. It would be very handy to have something like this. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 12:43, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Use the edit-count tool. click here. Then look at the section 'Article' near the bottom. If you forget the location of the edit-count tool, there is a link to it from the bottom of your Contributions page. EdJohnston (talk) 14:59, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks! I forgot this tool's feature. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 15:09, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
The edit-count tools appears offline; whenever I access that URL, all I get is a blank page. At least that's the case when I try to access it form behind my workplace's firewall, which wasn't so when I used it a month or so ago. -- llywrch (talk) 22:21, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
This might be a temporary problem at wmflabs. Just now none of the tools in http://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools are working for me. The edit counter was working at 15:00 on 21 October. EdJohnston (talk) 02:37, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
I get it too. --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 02:51, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Can auto archives include a noarchive or if command....

Example: |noarchive = User talk:Name#DYK for Alligator gar ? There are certain posts I don't want archived automatically, and I'm not sure how to go about it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Atsme☯Consult 14:57, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

@Atsme: Template:Do not archive until does this job; see its page for instructions. The template goes in the relevant thread, not in the archiving instructions. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:37, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
John of Reading - thank you! Atsme☯Consult 16:05, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Why data are store after the power off

In non volatile memory the data are store in digital form (+ve volt and -ve volt). if power is off then data are erase because data are store in the form of digital(+ve volt and -ve volt). THAN WHY DATA ARE STORE AFTER THE POWER OFF

HARE KRISHNA RAI — Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.118.61.166 (talk) 15:39, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

You want Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science. This is the place to discuss site features. Ian.thomson (talk) 15:47, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Allow me to explain. It's stored on someone else's computer (the Wikipedia servers). --User J. Dalek (talk | contribs) 02:08, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Toollabs down?

Can we get a dev update on the status of toollabs being completely down? I'm trying to run a copyvios check with The Earwig's tool. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:54, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Well, why do you think that toollabs is "completely down"? #wikimedia-labs on Freenode IRC or the mailing list might be more places to ask. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:55, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
  • For about 5 hours yesterday I got an "Internal Error" when I tried to use any tool hosted on toollabs (even the page that is suppose to list all the tools had no tools listed). Whatever the cause was, it resolved itself. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 03:13, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Meta-Wiki watchlist... a bug?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74330

Hm, why do I see the same page twice in my Meta-Wiki watchlist? Aren't pages supposed to appear once per watchlist? Is that some kind of a bug? As a note, this appeared today, newer saw it before. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:58, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

I am encountering something similar on Commons. Has the preferences checkbox "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" always been there? It seems that (on Commons) it has been switched on, whereas I think it was off previously (assuming it was an option prior to now). Wikipedia also has this checkbox, but it defaults to off. Dustin (talk) 20:01, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Just twice - is that all? I see m:Meetup/English South Coast 1 59 times, all are different edits. But that's what I would expect, since it's been edited 59 times in the last 30 days. BTW "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" has been an option for as long as I've been around (over 5 years), and yes I do have it set - otherwise I miss stuff. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:08, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Regardless, I am suddenly seeing multiple edits on single articles with Commons (rather than just the most recent edit), and the checkbox is suddenly checked (which is why I thought it might be connected). See http://i.imgur.com/ZSurJEY.png. The help desk at Commons appears no less than 29 times total. In any case, is the proper place to discuss this? Is there a better place to continue talking about this? Dustin (talk) 20:11, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

  Done, I've just deployed a configuration patch that fixed this. Cheers, Hoo man (talk) 20:43, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, now it works as expected. By the way, "expand watchlist to show all changes" wasn't ticked in my preferences, I've disabled that option long time ago. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:48, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

bibleversefinder tool not working

As the headline says, links to http://tools.wmflabs.org/bibleversefinder/ are not working. And they are in, like, all Bible-related articles!

It just gives me a blank page. I checked the source code and there is nothing there. At all.

How come this hasn't been noticed until now? Fix it ASAP!

Kiazore (talk) 00:33, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

The links I examined were made with {{Bibleverse}} or {{Bibleverse-lb}}. It was reported an hour ago at Template talk:Bibleverse#Broken again ? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:48, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Width hack in Template:Article history

I'm trying to figure out why there's an empty <td/> tag near the end of Template:Article history. It has the comment "width hack", and I don't see why it's necessary, but if it's not included the template doesn't have the correct width. I'd like to find out if there's a better way to do this, or if I have to use the hack again when converting the template to Lua.

Here's a reduced example:

With this code: 

<table class="tmbox tmbox-notice ">
  <tr>
    <td style="width:100%;">Foo</td>
  </tr>
</table>

We get this output:

Foo

But with this code: 

<table class="tmbox tmbox-notice ">
  <tr>
    <td style="width:100%;">Foo</td><td/><td/>
  </tr>
</table>

We get this output:

Foo

Is there a better way of constructing the HTML to get the proper width? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 00:46, 22 October 2014 (UTC)


Those extra <td /> tags get converted to <td></td> which is an empty cell. 

<table class="tmbox tmbox-notice">
<tr>
<td style="width:100%;">Foo</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>

I'm not sure if this is done by HTML Tidy or Sanitizer.php.

The issue is that there is no table width set: 

<table class="tmbox tmbox-notice" style="width:100%;">
<tr>
<td >Foo</td>
</tr>
</table>
Foo

--  Gadget850 talk 01:03, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Hmm, with the main table width set to 100%, the table extends off the screen for me, but a width of 80% gets it looking right. Setting the width to 80% inline doesn't work for small message boxes, though. Looking through MediaWiki:Common.css, it seems that that "messagebox" is the class to use to set the proper width, as it has a "width: 80%" rule. And everything appears to work if we have a main table tag of <table class="messagebox tmbox tmbox-notice"> for large message boxes and <table class="messagebox tmbox tmbox-notice mbox-small"> for small message boxes. So I'll use that in the new module (please correct me if this is the wrong approach). I'm still a little mystified as to why one table cell would produce the wrong width, but adding two extra empty table cells would make the width appear correct, however. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:34, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
I'm sure it can be figured out, but it involves digging through volumes of HTML specifications on table behaviour. But as Gadget850 mentions, using the messagebox class will solve the problem. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:11, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
Can you point me to a live example of where this hack is actually needed? Because if there aren't any, I'm simply going to remove this hack. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:33, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
@Edokter: It's currently used in Template:Article history - search the source for "<!--width hack-->". But we will be able to remove the hack if we add the messagebox class to top table element. I've already fixed that in Module:Article history, which isn't yet deployed. (It will probably be ready in a week or two.) I haven't seen it used anywhere else, but you never know. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:15, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
Mr. Stradivarius, that's not what I mean... are there any instances of {{Article history}} being used on any page that require this hack? If there aren't any live examples, then this is just a case of overzealous preventative coding. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:58, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

@Edokter: Ah, I see. Yes, it happens on quite a few pages, for example Talk:Artificial intelligence with the following invocation: 

{{Article history
|action1=PR
|action1date=12:27, 6 August 2009
|action1link=Wikipedia:Peer review/Artificial intelligence/archive1
|action1result=reviewed
|action1oldid=306387790
}}

If I remove the hack from the expanded wikitext, it looks like this:

August 6, 2009 Peer review Reviewed

There were a few other instances in the test cases too. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 10:25, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

I've 'normalized' the hack to remove the invalid tag. I don't quite how to handle this otherwise. Using the messagbox class may intoduce some redundant CSS, so I'd like to avoid that as well. Perhaps just add an empty cell for now as the template does now? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 14:13, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
Probably better would be to set the module to set an inline style of "width:80%" for large templates, and omit this style for small templates (and add the "mbox-small" class). That's more readable than adding an extra empty cell, although it is a bit of a hack in and of itself. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:32, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Image problem

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74389

Does anyone has any idea, why File:US Navy 120209-N-XD935-302 Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Shane Tuck, assigned to the Expeditionary Combat Camera Underwater Photo Team, c.jpg won't display on the English Wikipedia? Armbrust The Homunculus 13:29, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

It works at full size but a thumb gives another url than at Commons. I don't know why. The thumb example below gives the url:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/US_Navy_120209-N-XD935-302_Mass_Communication_Specialist_1st_Class_Shane_Tuck%2C_assigned_to_the_Expeditionary_Combat_Camera_Underwater_Photo_Team%2C_c.jpg/300px-thumbnail.jpg
Clicking it says "The given path of the specified thumbnail is incorrect". At Commons the same code gives the url:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/US_Navy_120209-N-XD935-302_Mass_Communication_Specialist_1st_Class_Shane_Tuck%2C_assigned_to_the_Expeditionary_Combat_Camera_Underwater_Photo_Team%2C_c.jpg/220px-US_Navy_120209-N-XD935-302_Mass_Communication_Specialist_1st_Class_Shane_Tuck%2C_assigned_to_the_Expeditionary_Combat_Camera_Underwater_Photo_Team%2C_c.jpg
Note the file name is repeated in the url. It displays the image at Commons and also when you click it. I think the same code at Wikipedia and Commons usually gives the same image url. Here are two others from Category:Featured pictures with the same error:
PrimeHunter (talk) 14:03, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
 
Could it be because the filename has comma(s)? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:20, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
@Edokter: I think you're on to something - I came across another file with the same problem, and it also contains commans (File:1801 Cary Map of the East Indies and Southeast Asia ( Singapore, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Philippines - Geographicus - EastIndies-cary-1801.jpg). ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 21:25, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
Whoop, I somehow entirely missed that PrimeHunter already provided that example. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 21:26, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
Same problem at Elizabeth II#Continuing evolution of the Commonwealth for File:Queen Elizabeth II and the Prime Ministers of the Commonwealth Nations, at Windsor Castle (1960 Commonwealth Prime Minister's Conference).jpg. DrKiernan (talk) 21:36, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
The pattern is files with filenames between 140-159 bytes long. It appears to be due to an accidental change in a setting when a different setting was changed. It should be fixed soonish (Definitely by tomorrow once people at wmf offices are at work). Bawolff (talk) 02:48, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
  Resolved
User:Cscott got the change deployed. Issue should be resolved now. If any pages still have broken images on them, doing a ?action=purge to the page should fix it. Bawolff (talk) 03:09, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Can't fix a bad URL in a citation

I can't fix the citations in the article 165th Street Bus Terminal. According to Help:CS1 errors#bad_url "The URL field is checked to ensure it includes either a colon (:) or the double forward slash (//). Further validation is not performed." The website in question does have those features, and the link is still broken. Why can't I fix them? ---------User:DanTD (talk) 16:13, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

I see that you've cured it by including the http:// which weren't there before. --David Biddulph (talk) 16:26, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
Yes, because evidently I was looking in the wrong places for them. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 16:47, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Xtools 2: Electric Boogaloo

The problem with the timing out was fixed, but it is now 404ing. KonveyorBelt 03:45, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

404 error also with the edit count tool, which has been occurring for many hours. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:32, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
404 continues. TParis says his "access is apparently screwed up", and recommends asking Cyberpower678 (last enwiki post 6 weeks ago) or Hedonil (last post on dewiki 7 weeks ago), for whom I left a message. Is there something "political" going on with this important toolset? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 11:06, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
My attention has been diverted here. Let me see what's going on.—cyberpower Temporarily OnlineTrick or Treat 11:43, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
  • My attempts to connect to labs have been unsuccessful. There's apparently more than dead tools going on here. "A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cyberpower678 (talk • contribs) 11:51, 23 October 2014‎
  •   Fixed

Bug in Minerva Beta (Mobile Site)

When on the mobile site, when I clicked on the user page, and then clicking the talk button, it is empty. Additionally, the Wikilink leads to "User talk:User:THEUSERNAME". Do you think it is a bug? - gacelperfinian(talk in - error? Start a new topic) 06:53, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Article count tool

The Xtools article count tool (the one linked from user contributions, not the WMF labs one) is down and showing a 404 error message. I don't know who runs it, so I thought I'd post here in case people weren't aware of the problem. G S Palmer (talk • contribs) 13:46, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes it is known, see T74104. Darkdadaah (talk) 14:00, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

New search and redirects

Dear technical experts: I wrote about this a few months ago, but I thought the problem was fixed.

The Articles for Creation project is particularly backlogged right now, with over 3,000 articles waiting. In order to attract help from subject specialists, I hoped to post this preconfigured search, which looks only in draft space:

By asking editors to type in the words "Review waiting" and adding their own keywords, such as "professor" or "football", editors should be able to see if there are any drafts of interest. This only works in the New Search, because the original one won't find text inside templates. However, pages keep appearing on the list which have already been accepted and are really redirects. These obviously don't have the words "Review waiting", although they likely once did.

I reported the problem before and ^demon was checking it out. I seem to remember that the problem before had to do with revision timestamps of the redirects. At the time ^demon ran a fix on the old redirects, but the problem seems to have reappeared.

My questions are:

  1. Has the problem been fixed, or are new redirects which are being incorrectly searched by the New Search engine still being created?
  2. I have access to AWB, and I should be able to find these redirects with it. If I made a small change that would add one new revision to each one, would they then no longer be picked up incorrectly by the search? (This would be an annoying way to fix the problem.)
  3. I have used the "Search prefixes" template to create the search box, but it doesn't have options for adding some default text, such as "Review waiting", which is why it has to be manually inserted each time. Is there another template that is more appropriate for this use, and still allows the searcher to add their own search words as well, or can an existing template be adapted to do this? —Anne Delong (talk) 19:18, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

What's the template for saying exactly what text a citation supports?

There are so many different pages about citations that I can't find the template I'm looking for. Basically you put it around the text supported by the citation and it links that text to the citation. Something like The Earth's sky is blue, but {{template|on the Moon it's green.|<ref>International Cheese Society: The Moon</ref>}} Here it's made clear that the citation doesn't say anything about the Earth's sky. --NE2 21:21, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

There isn't any. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:29, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
There is one; I've seen it used. --NE2 21:33, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
I think there is but it wasn't well received and I can't remember it. --  Gadget850 talk 21:35, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
Is it {{refn}}? See WP:REFNEST. – Margin1522 (talk) 21:46, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
No. I wrote that. --  Gadget850 talk 21:50, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
A simple search finds {{ref supports}}, which clarifies the part that is supported by a ref by repeating the claim inside the ref tag. It is not used in any articles though. There is {{cn span}} to highlight a piece of text which requires a citation, though there is no easily found equivalent for texts with reference. SiBr4 (talk) 22:03, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
Aha, I think I remember seeing {{cn span}}. Is there a reason this couldn't be done for simple citations (even if just at the editing level to make it clear to other editors what is explicitly sourced)? --NE2 22:14, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
The |quote= parameter of the cite templates allows people to specify exactly what part of the source supports the text. This is much more flexible than marking what text is supported by which sources. If that were standard, every article would become a tangled mess of spaghetti code. Using |quote= is extremely valuable and I wish more editors would do it. Jason Quinn (talk) 22:23, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
How do I use it for a map? :) (Actually, in the case I'm thinking of currently, it's fairly obvious that a 1935 map can only support that a secondary route already existed, not that it was extended in 1942 to replace a primary route.) --NE2 22:37, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
A similar q was raised on this page about three months ago, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 127#Requested new citation template feature: Hover the mouse over a footnote marker and the supported text is highlighted. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:58, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
T20231 (provide a way to specify what text/statement is supported by a <ref> block). --  Gadget850 talk 20:39, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Charlinsert below edit window gone

I've not edited for a few days and now the characters to insert ref tags, non-breaking space tags, etc. are gone from the bottom of the edit window. Is this a permanent change? Thanks. Victoria (tk) 23:47, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Can you check if the CharInsert gadget is still enabled here? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 07:46, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Hi Edokter, yes, that was the first thing I checked. It is enabled. Victoria (tk) 11:42, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Try to clear your entire cache. Both your examples are from "Wiki markup". Some users haven't noticed there is a drop-down box with other options. Do you have no box at all? Do you have JavaScript enabled in your browser? If you don't see a "[hide]" option at #toc then you probably don't have JavaScript and CharInsert doesn't run. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:55, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Hi PrimeHunter, I was thinking I might need to try a cache clearing. No, I don't have anything below the edit window except the field for the edit summary, the buttons for minor edit and to watch this page, and below the buttons to save, preview, show changes. Nothing else. Yes, JS enabled (and hide is visible). Nothing has changed since I last edited except the characters disappeared (which is annoying because I rely on them). Victoria (tk) 12:00, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Does it make a difference to log out? What is your skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:10, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
No, I always log out. I've cleared caches and restarted and still nothing there. Safari 6.1.6 btw. Victoria (tk) 12:11, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
I mean whether you have CharInsert when you are logged out. Your skin is the first selection at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. Are other gadgets working? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:24, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Interesting. Yes, the characters are there at the bottom when I open a page while logged out. The other gadgets are working. I have Monobook skin btw. Switching skins didn't make a difference; still gone. Victoria (tk) 12:33, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Try to disable CharInsert at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering, save settings, enable it again and save again. Do you have it at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&action=edit&useskin=cologneblue? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:54, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
I tried the disabling and enabling before coming here; didn't work. Interestingly it's there for Cologne Blue and Modern, not on Monobook and Vector. Victoria (tk) 13:00, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Try whether it works in MonoBook if you blank User:Victoriaearle/monobook.js (you may lose other things but can revert later). PrimeHunter (talk) 13:15, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Ah, it's back! I'll leave the monobook.js blanked for a bit. Victoria (tk) 13:53, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
PrimeHunter, thanks a lot for the trouble shooting on this - very helpful! I've put back User:Dr pda/prosesize.js, and User:GregU/dashes.js,[30]. Both work and the characters are still rendering at the bottom of the page, so it was something else I had there. Anyway, thanks again. Victoria (tk) 15:13, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Broken templates

It appears that a software edit that was recently deployed has broken several templates, for example {{R from other capitalisation}} (purge the page if you have visited it recently), which is used on over 400,000 pages. A close look at the template's text will show two asterisks (**) in the text. A look at the code shows these two asterisks directly follow the info= parameters. Before the software edit, this appeared as follows:

  • ...For more information follow the category link.
    • Use this rcat to tag...

and now it looks like this:

  • ...For more information follow the category link. ** Use this rcat to tag...

Does this mean that all of the templates that have this type of code will need to be fixed? or has something else broken that I don't know about? – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 00:04, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Okay, I see that two meta templates, {{Redirect template}} (recently edited) and {{Redirect template/core}} have just been converted to Lua, which may account for what I'm seeing in many of the rcats. – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 00:19, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
@Paine Ellsworth: Fixed. Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:43, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you beyond words, MJ! – Paine  01:19, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Page view statistics tool down?

http://stats.grok.se/en/201410/Foo says "internal server error", and nothing else. I get raw text, not even HTML. The search form at http://stats.grok.se/ still works, though. Paradoctor (talk) 08:35, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

  Done Works again. Paradoctor (talk) 20:44, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

"Group notice" and/or "Page notice" links

Although small, those " Group notice" and/or "Page notice" links that tend to appear on the righthand side of a page push the start of the page's content down a further line. Is it possible to make them e.g. float – and, if so, how, please? Sardanaphalus (talk) 11:10, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

You can hide them completely with this in your CSS:
.editnotice-area {display: none;}
PrimeHunter (talk) 11:40, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
  • That seems to work – thank you. Is it possible to float rather than hide them? (I experimented with replacing the display:none style, but to no (apparent) avail.) Regards, Sardanaphalus (talk) 09:08, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
The Group notice / Page notice links only appear when editing a page. If I view the page source when editing, I see that they are inside a <div class="editnotice-link" style="clear: both; float: right; margin: 0px 0.8em; padding: 0; line-height: 1em;"> so it's already floated. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:58, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
If you want to hide the links usually but still want a relatively easy way to see them when wanted then you can move the code from Special:MyPage/common.css (which is used on all skins) to Special:MyPage/vector.css (assuming your skin is Vector). When you want to see the links on an edit page you can specify another skin by for example manually adding &useskin=monobook or &useskin=modern to the url. You can also temporarily save another skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering but doing that and going back afterwards will prbably take longer. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:05, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Module:Wikidata

There's a little problem inside getDateValue fuction in Module:Wikidata. If the qualifier contains only a year, function prints 1 January 1986 instead of 1986. 

{{#invoke:Wikidata|getDateValue|P577|{{{published|FETCH_WIKIDATA}}}}}

--Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 20:17, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Have you reported this at Module talk:Wikidata? --Redrose64 (talk) 09:51, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Reported. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 12:18, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

{{Template:Admin_dashboard}}

The above template doesnt appear to be transcluding properly (at least from what I can see) to this page -User:Amortias/Admin_Dashboard,

Is it a template problem or something from my end I've missed?

Amortias (T)(C) 09:33, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

When you see a link instead of a transclusion, and the page is in Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded, it's an indication that the page that should be transcluded is too large. The admin dashboard is itself built up from a number of transclusions, so you need to see which of those is very large, and whether it can be cut down - ideally by fixing the problems that are reported on that page. My suspicion is WP:UAA. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:50, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Ok cheers for that, I've made a request at WP:AN for someone or someones to take a look at clearing the backlog. Amortias (T)(C) 10:03, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
  • I have reduced the signature from 189 to 96 characters. @Technical 13: while I highly doubt at the end of the day that this will really fix the issue (the issue is the backlog, not my signatures). It just allows for 9KB of additional backlog to pile up before someone gets to it. So that is really what needs fixing at the end of the day, not a signature. -- DQ (ʞlɐʇ) 17:18, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
    • @DeltaQuad:, I don't disagree but it helps for now... :) Thank you. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:44, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Tooltip text with protection padlocks missing

I noticed that the WP:protection icons (the colored padlocks) do not have a tooltip (mousehover text). For example here and here. The color by itself has no meaning, and ofter one first wants to know the sort of protection, not the background page. To add? -DePiep (talk) 12:05, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

I can see them (FF, MonoBook). — HHHIPPO 12:58, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
I see them too. The HTML includes 
<a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy#semi" title="This page is semi-protected."><img alt="Page semi-protected" ...></a>
<a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy#move" title="This page is move-protected."><img alt="Page move-protected" ...></a>
and Firefox gets the tooltips from those title= attributes. @DePiep: Which browser are you using? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:13, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Checking things. (Ff, Safari atop WinXP; login/logout) -DePiep (talk) 13:21, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Checked: Ff 32.0.3 and Safari v? both atop WinXP. Did Restart computer, Ff cache cleanup.
Checked page: WP:TFD (via).
Icons checked: yellow padlock (protection), question mark (help-page notice), main wiki-globe (top-left)
All icons always have cursor-change (indicating hyperlink) and click works (opens hyperlink). (OK)
Wiki-globe always shows tooltip. (OK)
When logged-out: all icons show tooltip. (OK)
When logged in (User:DePiep): WP:TFD page icons padlock and question mark do not show tooltip. Not in Safari, not in Ff. (Not OK).
I had enabled beta-mw:Beta Features/Hovercards. When disabled this and logout, login (checked: is disabled indeed). Then the tooltip shows as expected. (OK)
Conclude: Likely hovercards-related. ping @Deskana (WMF): (lead at mw). Any more tests to do? -DePiep (talk) 14:45, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
ping Hhhippo, Redrose64. -DePiep (talk) 16:15, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
I think you're right, and T70417 might be relevant. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:28, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Noindexing articles

At Template:noindex, it says that the template doesn't work on articles. How do you exclude articles from search indexing? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 16:05, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Why would you want to? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:47, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Well, as I understand this, we do this for speedy deletion nominated pages, so attack pages and copyvios don't appear on search engines. I also tried to do this with {{Not English}} since I suspect spammers sometimes post in the wrong language wiki to delay scrutiny of their spam pages. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 16:56, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
You don't. If an article is so bad that search engines shouldn't be able to see it, it should be speedily deleted. If a tag could noindex an article, you'd have people trying to sneak that tag into articles that make them look bad. Jackmcbarn (talk) 17:09, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Redirect to disambig

Let's say I have in my js page such code 

.mw-disambig { //for links to disambiguation pages
background-color: #ff9191;
}
 
.mw-redirect, .mw-redirect:visited { //for links to redirects
  color: green;
}

When I have a redirect to disambig only the mw-redirect class works. So my question is: how to make a different style for links to redirect to disambig pages, if it's possible?

And (also, if it's possible) how to get a different style for mw-disambig class included in some other class (let's say, I don't want to display backgrounded links to disambigs within hatnote template, where the class hatnote is used). I hope that somebody catched what I mean :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:22, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

If you're putting it in your js page, I'm surprised that any of it works. The code above is not JavaScript, it is CSS, and so should be in your .css page. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:01, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
User:Anomie/linkclassifier may be helpful. --  Gadget850 talk 19:23, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Redrose64, yes, of course. In my css page, not js :) I sometimes write such stupid things :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 00:53, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
OK then, since it's code placed on a .css page, there are two invalid constructs there: //for links to disambiguation pages and //for links to redirects. These are invalid because CSS doesn't recognise BCPL-style end-of-line comments - the only valid comments in CSS are inline, as in /* for links to disambiguation pages */ or similar (CSS treats all newlines as if they were normal spaces, and since comments should be capable of containing spaces, a space (whether a newline or a true space) cannot be the marker for the end of a comment). --Redrose64 (talk) 11:12, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
Technical 13, it's in his userspace on the Latvian Wikipedia. @Edgars2007: To apply styling to elements with two specific classes, join the class names together without whitespace: 
.mw-disambig.mw-redirect { markup for redirects to dab pages }
As for the second question, .hatnote .mw-disambig { markup } (with space between the classes) applies to elements with class "mw-disambig" within a "hatnote" class element (replacing "markup" with some actual markup rules, obviously). SiBr4 (talk) 14:38, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:30, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Cannot edit section 2 because it does not exist - apparently!!

I am trying to edit the Bibliography at the Wikipedia page: Simon Clark (novelist). However I am unable to do this as it says it does not exist - although obviously it does!! S.tollyfield (talk) 13:27, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

@S.tollyfield: This edit fixed it - the problem was an unclosed <ref> tag before the start of the section. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:33, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

ThanksS.tollyfield (talk) 13:35, 26 October 2014 (UTC)


/js ceased to work at some point

Some time over the last couple of years, my monobook.js stopped working. (Might this relate to a change in the Mediawiki software?) Anyone know what might have caused this? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:48, 26 October 2014 (UTC).

IIRC the terms of the ArbCom ruling included the direction that you "blank userspace js pages associated with his account/s". --Redrose64 (talk) 15:07, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
That wasn't what I was asking about. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:02, 26 October 2014 (UTC).
There were some fairly major changes in MediaWiki 1.25, which removed these long-deprecated items earlier this month:
  • Remove mw.user.name() method. 1 Use mw.user.getName() instead.
  • Remove mw.user.anon() method. 1 Use mw.user.isAnon() instead.
  • Remove mediawiki.api methods' "ok" and "err" callback parameters. 2 Use the returned Promise interface instead.
  • Remove mediawiki.api.category "async" parameter. 2 The ability to override $.ajax() to not be asynchronous has been removed. The default (asynchronous) behaviour remains. Use the Promise interface to retreive the fetched data from the API.
  • Remove jquery.json module. 3 Use standardised JSON.stringify and JSON.parse methods. And depend on the "json" module to ensure a polyfill is lazy-loaded for cross-browser support.
If a script uses any of these, then it will be broken now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Meta RfCs on two new global groups

Hello all,

There are currently requests for comment open on meta to create two new global groups. The first is a group for members of the OTRS permissions queue, which would not contain any additional user rights. That proposal can be found at m:Requests for comment/Creation of a global OTRS-permissions user group. The second is a group for Wikimedia Commons admins and OTRS agents to view deleted file pages through the 'viewdeletedfile' right on all wikis except those who opt-out. The second proposal can be found at m:Requests for comment/Global file deletion review.

We would like to hear what you think on both proposals. Both are in English; if you wanted to translate them into your native language that would also be appreciated.

It is possible for individual projects to opt-out, so that users in those groups do not have any additional rights on those projects. To do this please start a local discussion, and if there is consensus you can request to opt-out of either or both at m:Stewards' noticeboard.

Thanks and regards, Ajraddatz (talk) 18:04, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

"What links here" problem

When I click on What links here from Silion it shows me a short list of callers [31]. However I am unable to reconcile the list with actuality. The first line shows User talk:Maheshkumaryadav/Archive 4 but I see nothing on this page, and the user was blocked some time before Silion was created. [When I tried about an hour ago there were other similar wrong entries, but the recent wp unavailabilty seems to have straightened it somewhat.]

As an aside, is there an easy way to get the opposite list? (I.e. what this page calls) which would just be a summary of all the blue (and red) links?

Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Mon 11:07, wikitime= 03:07, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

@Unbuttered Parsnip: (partial answer) Silion is indeed linked from User talk:Maheshkumaryadav/Archive 4 - it is inside the "Extended content" box in this section. A version of the Silion article was deleted in 2011. I don't know the answer to your "aside" without using AWB. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:25, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. That explains why "An aphrodisiac" (spellings vary) was on the list too. And on close examination of other pages' lists, it seems that "ins" and "outs" are jumbled together. Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Wed 06:35, wikitime= 22:35, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-44

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 an issue with files from Commons on October 21. You could only see those with names between 140 and 159 characters by visiting Commons itself. [32]
  • There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly. [33]
  • There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [34]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday. [35]
  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28, and on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
  • VisualEditor now uses autovalues for templates if they are in TemplateData. [36] [37] [38]
  • VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them. [39]
  • VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit". [40]
  • The rules for plurals in translations changed in some languages. Interface translations are currently not being updated from translatewiki.net; this process will start again on November 6. [41]

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

05:21, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Greyness

Here from the line containing "pwned" to the end the text appears grey. I can't see a reason for this. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:18, 27 October 2014 (UTC).

It's due to broken markup earlier in the page. Search for "to start to understand" in the wikitext, and you'll see a series of font tags changing between grey and black in a way that's rather against the rules of HTML. Apparently, the software's reaction to this was to color all the remainder of the page in grey, grey, grey and black (with black taking precedence) up until it found a sufficiently indented element, and then to render in grey, grey and grey instead. I'm not sure what the policy on fixing broken markup in archive pages is, so I'm not sure if it's for the best to fix the page or not. --ais523 13:39, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
There were quite a lot of misnested <font>...</font> elements which spanned a </dd><dd> pair; HTML Tidy made a good go of adding </font> and <font> where it could, but as far as I could work out, there were four that were opened but not closed, so I removed one and closed three, thus. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:02, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Right, fixing markup, categories and some other details in archives is fine. It's only the discussions you shouldn't continue. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:06, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Good work. I would have fixed it if I had seen where the problem lay. I am still mystified how this caused 'font color="gray" to kick in about a hundred lines further down the page, but I have heard that HTML Tidy is flawed. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:16, 27 October 2014 (UTC).

It appears it was the use of {{OED}} which made it kick in. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:09, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Four difflink syntax behavior questions.

I ran across an old (archived) policy discussion from 2008 that referenced edit diff #1 below. After a bit of research it appears what was actually being referred to is what is shown in edit diff #4 below.

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Casino_Royale_%281967_film%29&diff=cur&oldid=252351881|
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Casino_Royale_%281967_film%29&diff=cur&oldid=252351881
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Casino_Royale_%281967_film%29&diff=next&oldid=252351881|
  4. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Casino_Royale_%281967_film%29&diff=next&oldid=252351881

As you can see the only syntax changes between these examples are the diff= keyword (cur vs next) and the inclusion/exclusion of the final vertical bar. This short journey into the world of diff link syntax has left me with a few questions:

  • (A) Why would the inclusion of a vertical bar (a common enough syntax within wikipedia) make such a profound difference in the results returned? Compare diff #1 to #2 and then compare diff #3 to #4 as example.
  • (B) Why are the resulting page formats so radically different between #1 & #3 above when all that has changed is the diff= keyword?
  • (C) Why does diff #1 not even show revision #252351881 at all? The other three examples show it in various ways?
  • (D) Why are the sections so out of synch in diff #2 above? Granted a great many edits have been made between the two revisions but could these diffs not synch by section name as long as section sequence or names are not changed? Case in point look at the ==plot== and ==cast== positions between the old and new revisions.

Does any of this reflect some sort of error(s) in processing diff links? 104.32.193.6 (talk) 14:07, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Pipes "|" are common in wikisyntax but not in url's where parameters are separated by "&" (this is general for url's and not wiki-specific). "252351881|" is not a valid revision id so "oldid=252351881|" cannot be expected to work and may give different results in different contexts. Editors sometimes mix up wikilink syntax and external link syntax and write "|" as an attempt to separate a url from text they want displayed. A space is the correct syntax. See Help:link. Good diffs can be hard to make. Section headings are just lines and can be moved around like other source lines. WP:wikEdDiff sometimes gives better diffs. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:28, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Yes, don't bang pipes against URLs. As regards the legal values for &diff=, I put a description of this at User talk:Paine Ellsworth#Diffs and oldids which seemed to be well received. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:08, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Coordinates display appears to be broken

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74559

Something's wrong with the way geographical coordinates are being displayed. It affects everything from the infobox in Paris to the table at National Register of Historic Places listings in Piute County, Utah. I understand nothing about the labyrinth of templates involved with this, but could someone knowledgeable please fix it? Ntsimp (talk) 14:44, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

 – Redrose64 (talk) 15:00, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

On the articles Pennsylvania Station (New York City) and Pennsylvania Station (1910–1963), the infobox is too big, as it is taking half of the side of the page. It looks like it's because of the {{#coordinates:}} tag. Is this localized to just these two articles, or is it a general problem with the markup of the template? – Epicgenius (talk) 14:01, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

@Epicgenius: It's nothing to do with {{infobox station}}. The problem is in {{coord}}, or the module now used for that; this can be demonstrated quite simply:
40°45′02″N 73°59′38″W / 40.750638°N 73.993899°W / 40.750638; -73.993899
That should not yield exposed markup. Template:Coord was last modified by Mr. Stradivarius (talk · contribs), and Module:Coordinates was last modified by MSGJ (talk · contribs). --Redrose64 (talk) 14:21, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
The #coordinates tag as mentioned at Help:Magic_words#Other has stopped working. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:32, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Maybe that is the root of the problem. How do we get it to work again? Epicgenius (talk) 14:38, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
From the bug report, it looks like Wikimedia Ops is working on it now. Give it a few hours, and it will likely be working again. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:44, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict × 2) This is actually a problem with the #coordinates parser function in Template:Coord, and isn't caused by anything in the module. The #coordinates code there has been the same since it was added in 2012, and it never got added to the module because it didn't play nicely with Lua. The infobox on Pennsylvania Station (1910–1963) expands to give the #coordinates code
{{#coordinates:40.7503|-73.9931|type:landmark||||||
|primary
|name=
}}
...which just returns the invocation without processing it. Why it does this I'm not too sure - I've never looked into the details of what #coordinates does. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:40, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

All the settlement infoboxes have been screwed too (see San Francisco, or Athens, or Bordeaux). Someone has "cleverly" edited something somewhere which has screwed tons of infoboxes, but I can't detect where the error is coming from. Der Statistiker (talk) 14:55, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Ah, it seems it's restored now. Really odd... Der Statistiker (talk) 14:57, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
 – Redrose64 (talk) 14:55, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Has your change to Infobox Settlement broken it? When I try to change a pushpin map parameter, the map winds up looking like this. The only change I made was specifying "pushpin_label = Richburg". Any ideas? --Ken Gallager (talk) 14:04, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
@Ken Gallager:, No, it's not {{Infobox Settlement}} - this is the same problem as described at Template talk:Infobox station#Width. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:25, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
(Moving discussion to User talk:Redrose64) --Ken Gallager (talk) 14:32, 27
 – I'm merely an observer --Redrose64 (talk) 14:49, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi Redrose64, thanks for your response to my question about the coordinates problem with {{Infobox settlement}}. So what is the solution for someone like me who's just a regular user of the infobox? I see the {{Coord}} template was last changed in August, while User:WOSlinker's change to Infobox Settlement was two days ago. The problem just started cropping up this morning, after I had already made several edits to articles that use the Settlement infobox. Thanks, --Ken Gallager (talk) 14:36, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

It's a system wide issue, see bug 72559. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:38, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
 – Redrose64 (talk) 15:26, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Something is wrong with this template, such that any time an article containing it is edited, a bunch of visible code appears at the beginning of the article. I noticed this when I edited Cleator; and to check that it wasn't just a problem with the infobox's implementation in that particular article, I performed null edits on Aberfoyle, Stirling and Abergavenny, and they too got messed up. I've tried to trace the problem back through the template's history, but I just don't know enough about coding to find out what's wrong. Could Frietjes or Sardanaphalus or someone else who understands this template take a look? It's used in a lot of articles, and there's a pretty great potential for disruption. Deor (talk) 14:31, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

It's not just an issue with this template, see Template_talk:Infobox_station#Width. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:35, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
  • I've just tried some testing and am now wondering if the problem is caused by how and/or which parameters are given to {{Coord}} by this template's "Co-ordinates for top of page" section..? Sardanaphalus (talk) 15:04, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
As WOSlinker said above, this seems to be a system-wide problem with {{#coordinates:}} calls. I assume folks are working on it. (See also WP:VP/T#Coordinates display appears to be broken.) Deor (talk) 15:10, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Understood – and I now see the "Tracked in Bugzilla" template. Sardanaphalus (talk) 15:26, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
 – Redrose64 (talk) 15:18, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

This template is displaying coordinates like the following:

52°22′N 4°54′E{{#coordinates:52|22|N|4|54|E|type:city(813562)_region:NL|| |primary |name= }}

Examples: Amsterdam, Acapulco, Alexandria, Atlanta, Berlin, Brussels

Is it related to the most recent edit related to duplicate parameters? [42] ——Rich jj (talk) 14:41, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Okay, apparently this is a bigger issue than just this template, affecting any use of Template:Coord. Template talk:Infobox station#Width pointed this out to me, along with a link to the tracked issue in Bugzilla. ——Rich jj (talk) 14:48, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Odd coords display

At the top of the page Grimsby, I'm seeing the following in Read mode:

{{#coordinates:53.5595 |-0.0680

|region:GB_type:city(87574)
||||||

|primary |name= }}

Even though (a) I'm fairly sure this isn't a recent screw-up in Edit mode, since I see the same thing in 2009 versions of the article, OTOH (b) I don't get this error with other ledes with coords in them (e.g. Los Angeles, London), so I don't think it's my browser, either.

Anyone else seeing this? Any ideas? It Is Me Here t / c 15:01, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

This is the system-wide problem that's the topic of the section immediately above. Deor (talk) 15:05, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Ops and devs are aware. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:25, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
The bugzilla page is demonstrating that Wikivoyage is having the same problems, so it's clearly not something that can be fixed locally: we'll have to depend on the ops and devs. Nyttend (talk) 15:28, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Sitenotice

This is a huge issue, affecting 957,111 pages, or more than 20% of the entire encyclopedia. Will anyone object to a sitenotice? If not, I promise that I'll do better than the previous time, when I made a little coding error. Nyttend (talk) 15:28, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

It should be already fixed. Purge to check? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:38, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
It is. Thanks so much for the rapid work! Nyttend (talk) 15:42, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Ref in a ref?

A FA reviewer has asked me to upgrade me text-only references to ones in the same style as the rest of the document, which are almost always SFN. All of my attempts to do this, no matter if they are SFN or normal ref tags, has failed. Ref in blockquote? No problem! Ref in note ref? Problem. Any way around this? Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:43, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

@Maury Markowitz: Put the note and its ref inside {{efn}}, see for example note [a] here. There are less-easy ways, using {{#tag:ref|...}} --Redrose64 (talk) 21:14, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
See also WP:REFNEST; the issues and limits are noted there. More details might help. --  Gadget850 talk 21:15, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
St. Joseph's Catholic Church (Egypt, Ohio) uses a slightly different format, the one I've always found easiest: just put {{cref|a}} at the spot where the note would go, and then in your Notes section, put {{cnote|a|Type the contents of the note here, including the citation}} Perhaps it's not exactly SFN, but the coding looks simpler to me than the {{efn}} that Redrose is using. Nyttend (talk) 22:04, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
@Nyttend: Since you need to specify the letter in both templates, it's more complicated than {{efn}} - where I just put {{efn|Type the contents of the note here, including the citation}} (one parameter, not counting those in the citation) at the spot where the note would go, and then in the Notes section, put {{notelist}} (no parameters). --Redrose64 (talk) 22:23, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Okay, I was misunderstanding; I see better now. Nyttend (talk) 22:26, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
There is an ancient bug about stuff in between ref tags. It would be nice if that could get some attention from the devs.   All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:18, 27 October 2014 (UTC).

Ok this looks perfect. Thanks again VP gurus! Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:23, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose64:- I managed to get most of these working great. However, if you look at AI Mk. IV radar#Mk. I you'll notice that there is one that complains about no ref content in spite of it seemingly being identical to all the others. Look for the words "a small amount". Any ideas? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:42, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
@Maury Markowitz: The text of this footnote contains an equals sign, so it needs special treatment. See the last part of Template:Efn#Usage. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:08, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
LOLZ, I'll fix that! :-) Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:31, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

revision history statistics

hi, the "revision history statistics" link is down, thank you--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 00:40, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Where is the "revision history statistics link" (please paste the actual link when you talk about a link)? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:00, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
It's at "External tools" in page histories at the English Wikipedia for users with en or en-gb as language. It's made by MediaWiki:Histlegend and goes to https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/articleinfo. Xtools have been down for long periods in the last weeks but are currently up again. The Xtools problems are discussed in several threads here. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:31, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Developer job openings

Hi, There are currently some job openings in a few of the WMF's Engineering departments, that I thought might be of interest to someone here (if you hadn't already seen them), or you might know someone to nudge. Hope that helps. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 02:00, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

  • I applied for few other positions.   --Tito☸Dutta 16:10, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Bot issue

It seems to be a bot been editing while logged out or some technical issue. Special:Contributions/10.68.16.32. This was x-post from WP:AN. ///EuroCarGT 03:28, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, please see WP:BOWN for recent comments. We are not blocking at this time. — xaosflux Talk 03:35, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

The Jewish Encyclopedia's internet address

The Jewish Encyclopedia's internet address has changed - all links should be fixed. See, for example, in Apion. Liadmalone (talk) 10:46, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

That's likely a DNS goof. There is occasionally reason to have separate www.something.com and something.com servers, but the www.something.com is almost always the one that is commonly used by the public. I'll ask them. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 11:13, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
I've also posted about it at their Feedback site. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 09:07, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Reported again to a wider audience. If anyone knows anyone at the org that runs the site, please let them know. Links on the web that point to the www... address outnumber those that point to just the domain by about 10:1. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 00:55, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
@Liadmalone: It took some doing, but it's been   Fixed. www.jewishencyclopedia.com works again. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 07:27, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you. In the meantime, if I'm not mistaking, User:Matanya created a BOT which was supposed to change each of the old broken links into the new ones with the "www". Apparently they both work now. Liadmalone (talk) 08:27, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Can't access list of contributors

I haven't been able to load the page that lists contributors for several days. It's normally available at http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php Does anyone have information about this? SlimVirgin (talk) 19:03, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

A few days? Toolserver's been down for nigh on four months. Permanently. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:46, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
I've been able to get lists of contributors quite recently, though. Perhaps from another link? SlimVirgin (talk) 22:57, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
The replacement tools should be at https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikisense/ , although it looks as if they're having problems. (And inconveniant typos.) Rcsprinter123 (banter) @ 21:00, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php redirects to https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/articleinfo/. The toolserver redirect seems to work but the target doesn't. All Xtools have been unstable for weeks. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:50, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the replies. I haven't followed what has gone on with these tools, but things that we've relied on for a long time keep disappearing. Is there someone in the Wikimedia Foundation dealing with it, or is it not a Foundation issue? SlimVirgin (talk) 22:57, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Well, SlimVirgin there's Toolserver replacements, started in July, and a whole lot of threads on the VP Technical here about that same time.— Maile (talk) 23:24, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you, Maile. It's hard to see what's what. Is there currently a way to access the list of contributors to an article? SlimVirgin (talk) 23:44, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
The tested Xtools are currently working again. That means the redirect at http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php also works. I don't know whether https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikisense/ has ever worked. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:36, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, PrimeHunter, I can get http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php to work now, as a redirect to https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/articleinfo/ SlimVirgin (talk) 02:13, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Optics 

 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  1,365 Revisions (+2 days), 679 Authors, 207 Page watchers, – Pageviews (30 days), Created by: The Cunctator (6,537) · See full page statistics

Just to document a related symptom, the statistics for an article are back, as well. They went missing at just about the same timeframe that @SlimVirgin was asking about the missing list of contributors. I just noticed a little blue hat which I now see as the first item in the statistics, and the tooltip that appears when I hover the cursor over it identifies the little blue hat as Xagent configuration --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 11:36, 28 October 2014 (UTC) My belated thanks to Hedonil for sharing these XTools. 12:11, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

If you copy the below to your .js userspace:
mw.loader.load( '//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Hedonil/XTools/XTools.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );
this tool produces (at least on Modern skin) a single line at the top of the article that is a little recap of what you want. Click on "see full page statistics" on that line, and it takes you to a breakdown of many things, one of which is all of the contributors. — Maile (talk) 14:50, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Maile66, thank you! That's really useful. The "see full page stats" link goes to https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/articleinfo SlimVirgin (talk) 02:18, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Thanks, George. That's the one I used to use, but I thought it had disappeared. SlimVirgin (talk) 02:20, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Watchlist page changes not notified on watchlist

From time to time some third party edits to pages on my Watchlist are not notified to me on my Watchlist. Example Postural Integration, regular changes by user Karin Power do not get notified (more recently 16 October with a subsequent BOT same date). Could I have neglected to set some settings correctly? or how can the issue be rectified? Many thanks for your help. Greetings, Osioni (talk) 19:39, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

That's one of the very irritating features of make-work edits by bots. In Special:Preferences your Watchlist can be configured. If "Hide bot edits from the watchlist" is enabled, your watchlist will not list a page where the last edit was by a bot. If it is not enabled, a decent-sized watchlist will be mercilessly spammed by bots. In other words, there is no good setting. Johnuniq (talk) 00:05, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
The setting that would be most useful is "If a bot made the last edit, then show the previous contribution in my watchlist (exactly as if the bot had never edited anything)". But that doesn't exist, and there are probably lots of people ready to tell us why it never well (performance reasons). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:42, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
That's T11790. It probably needs someone to find time to look at it. Anomie⚔ 11:24, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikimedia labs pages and edit count page

Hello,
Almost all Wikimedia Labs pages are taking a long time to open and some pages are not opening at all.
The edit count page linked at the bottom of "contributions" page is not opening (I have been trying for last few days). --Tito☸Dutta 16:16, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

The edit counter is xtools. See the thread above named "Xtools / edit counter". It does load for me but takes about 15 seconds or so. If some pages don't load at all, please provide examples. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 20:28, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
These pages are either not loading or taking lots of time to load EditCount, semi-automated edits and almost every Wikimedia Labs page (user's deails: Kolkata, India, Firefox 32.0.3, Win 7, 1.31 Mbps d/l speed). It took 40 seconds for me to load edit counter (now after midnight, I can't open it in office hours/daytime). --Tito☸Dutta 20:39, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Edit Count (Contributions > Edit Count) seems to be up and running again, although 'running' is clearly too positive a term. 'Crawling' would be more accurate as it also takes 40 seconds to load my edit count page.--Wolbo (talk) 16:33, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

30 day limit on Watchlist

Why are watchlists limited to 30 days maximum? It means that editors cannot easily access the neglected articles on their lists. Is this something that could be corrected? Thanks. Opus33 (talk) 16:57, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

I would guess this is due to performance reasons. Watchlists function from the recent changes database table which has that limitation. I guess it could be considered a bug, but not one that I'd expect to see resolved. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 17:08, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for your answer. Opus33 (talk) 21:08, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
mw:Manual:$wgRCMaxAge is set to 30 days for Wikimedia wikis in http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=CommonSettings.php which says $wgRCMaxAge = 30 * 86400;. See also bugzilla:6341. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:38, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Navbox templates whose name parameter does not match the template's actual name

I have found four or five Navbox templates in which the |name= parameter does not match the actual name of the template, such as Stars of Andromeda. This makes the V/T/E links in the upper left corner of the navbox fail to go to the correct place, as documented in the template's documentation.

Should a maintenance category or a bot task be created that tags these templates somehow? Is there a valid reason to have the |name= parameter fail to match the actual name of the template? I read the documentation for the Navbox template, and it looks like |name= should always be set to the name of the template, so why is this parameter user-editable at all? I imagine there is some clever explanation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:16, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

If you change {{navbox to {{#invoke:navbox|navbox, then the name parameter is no longer necessary at all. I think we should take that route, rather than making an effort to keep all of them in sync. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:02, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the tip. So how do we locate these broken Navboxen in the first place? – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:08, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
We can't find the broken ones on-wiki. We'd have to search through a database dump. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:22, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
I suggested it with no success at Wikipedia talk:Database reports#Navboxes with wrong name parameters. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:59, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Why don't we just get a bot to change all invocations of {{navbox to {{#invoke:navbox|navbox? We could do that once, then deprecate Template:Navbox so that it wouldn't be transcluded in the future. That would avoid the need to look at database dumps entirely. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 12:11, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
That would still leave a number of wrapper templates such as {{Navbox musical artist}} needing the name param. -- WOSlinker (talk) 12:27, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
Good point. To get the name automatically, we would need to convert those wrapper templates to Lua as well, which means some more thought is needed. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:34, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
I've been doing some experimenting, and I've found a way to pass the template name through automatically to wrapper templates without converting them to Lua. It involves a simple module like Module:User:Mr. Stradivarius/Parent title, which can be used in a template to get that template's name, even when it is being called from a different page. That name can then be passed through to the wrapper template, which in turn can pass it through to Module:Navbox. Just converting the wrapper templates to Lua would be cleaner, though, and probably not too much work. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:56, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
Also, just because wrapper templates would still need a name parameter needn't stop us from converting {{navbox to {{#invoke:navbox|navbox, as long as the |name= parameter is still respected in the module. It would just mean that only wrapper templates and templates that call them would need to worry about setting a name. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:04, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
The name parameter is still respected. Actually, I think I might try to convince Brad or Tim to expose all ancestor frames to Lua, but I'm not sure if they'll go for it. Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:49, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Tiny glitch

More of a curiosity really. It was mentioned at [43], and at the time I remembered seeing it but couldn't remember the exact circumstances. Anyway, one way to reproduce it in Win 7, IE11:

  1. In the Wikipedia search field, type the name of a page that is redirected, e.g. type "mona lisa", which redirects you to "Mona Lisa".
  2. Click on the "Redirected from" link at the top of the article to go to the redirect page.
  3. Click the browser's Back button.
  4. A line of text "Jump to: navigation, search" appears at the top of the article, but disappears as soon as you click anywhere on the article.

109.145.182.239 (talk) 02:41, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

At first glance, it seems like that line's .CSS styling is set somewhere to overflow:hidden; height:0px; rather than display:none; in an attempt to "hide" the line until needed. When exactly that is suppose be, I can't say. Personally, I've never actually seen that line rendered "intentionally" in all my wiki-travels (well, at least not under the monobook or vector skins that is) but its always been there in the underlying HTML as far as I can remember.

Add to that the fact back [button] caching under a secure (https://) wiki mark-up & IE is 'not likely' to come off without a hitch (see IE11's F12 Developer Tools if you're familiar; it sez --> DOM7011: The code on this page disabled back and forward caching. For more information, see: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=291337 File: index.php) and of course things like that "ghost text" on back or forward are bound to occur. -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:18, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Users sometimes report seeing the line in different circumstances. I see it in Firefox if I click on "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" and then press Tab. See also Talk:Main Page/Archive 181#Did something change? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:01, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Time to knock out obsolete HTML tags

Since we use try to keep the compatibility with a new technology – HTML5 (see [44], [45]), we have to stop using the <center> tag. It can be safely replaced with {{center}} and its larger version – {{Startcenter}}. I think we should set up a bot to replace this crazy old thing. Please note that the valid HTML is a very important thing, see WP:HTMLBUGS for more details.

There are 49,680 use cases of <center> across all Wikipedia articles. Finally, please see the page from W3C validator on Mars. There are 125 Errors, we really need to do something with it.

Regards, --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 10:48, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

I don't really see the case for ditching the center tag in favour of a center css class. yes, the tag is deprecated, but the reason for deprecation is that it's a non-semantic tag. Replacing a non-semantic tag with a non semantic css class would be equally bad busywork. I am in favour of replacing current uses of the center tag with semantic classes, but that's cumbersome in mediawiki. mw:Requests for comment/Allow styling in templates could help move that along - I hope User:Brion finds the time to work on that. Replacing one wrong now with an equally wrong alternative doesn't help us here. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:18, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
When cleaning up an article, I often use HTML validation to detect duplicate IDs and other issues. The use of obsolete HTML makes it more difficult to see and resolve issues that are really broken.
Wholesale replacement of <center> would not be bad, but I have found a number of uses where it is inappropriate or redundant, such as enclosing a table that is 100% width.
We currently have five obsolete HTML elements that are allowed:
  • <big>...</big> → {{big}}
  • <center>...</center> → {{center}}
  • <tt>...</tt> → <code>...</code>
  • <strike>...</strike> → <s>...</s>
  • <font>...</font> → {{font}}
I recently cleaned up an article where the <font> tags were setting the content to black, thus it was totally redundant. --  Gadget850 talk 12:46, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
So, it's time to start a big migration project. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 13:45, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
That a validator catches the center tags is a good thing. That it doesn't catch the center templates is a bad thing. Tricking the validator into accepting something bad (like center templates) is a worse thing. If you do that. Inappropriate use (like center on 100% width elements) must be removed, not replaced. Silencing the warning on validation might be a better approach, until we can solve this structurally. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 15:19, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
  • I support all except replacing <tt>...</tt> with <code>...</code> as it is sometimes more appropriate to replace it with <kbd>...</kbd> or with just a span with some css. It has to do with the backgrounds and other formatting associated with each tag. I've been cleaning up as many of these as I see anyways and have been requesting editors using them in signatures to update their signatures as well. I'd be happy to run a bot through to clean up what I can. I know I can do big, center, and strike. Like I said about tt, it isn't consistent with what an appropriate replacement is so can't be bot replaced and I've had difficulties with trying to replace the font tags reliably with bot edits so I skip those as well. My skin.css makes all of these tags (and a couple more IIRC) obvious, so I am having no difficulties finding them. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 13:47, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
You are correct. And there are a number of articles with code samples that should not be changed. --  Gadget850 talk 13:58, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
They're placed inside <pre>...</pre> or other tags/templates, so no problem, I think. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 14:49, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
@Technical 13: User talk:Technical 13#cellpadding, cellspacing, align, valign, width, border. Helder 15:36, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 112#RfC: Should deprecated/invalid/unsupported HTML tags be discouraged?. Helder 15:36, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
It's important to remember wikitext != HTML. Legoktm (talk) 19:56, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
@Legoktm: What does that mean? --  Gadget850 talk 20:42, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
I think that it means that just because some HTML element is deprecated or marked as obsolete by W3C, doesn't necessarily mean that it is deprecated or obsolete Wikimarkup. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:18, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
That is an empty statement. In MediaWiki land, some HTML is whitelisted, but has no relation to wikitext whatsoever. If HTML tags are deprecated, it means just that, and we should no longer use it, or even allow it. The only other option is to declare these deprecated HTML tags to be wiki markup, in which case we must stranslate them to valid HTML5/CSS. I am not a fan of that option, but removing them from the whitelist is worse. But at some point, MediaWiki/Wikipedia will have to stop emitting obsolete HTML one way or the other. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:04, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
I have been going through and cleaning up <center>. In many instances I have been removing it altogether, where used
  • to center a table, as this may conflict with the table markup. For example, {{clade}}, {{ahnentafel5}} and {{family tree/start}} have a |style= parameter.
  • to center text in a cell where the table class is wikitable which applies a CSS rule to center text.
  • to center templates such as {{gallery}} which have an |align= parameter
--  Gadget850 talk 00:01, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
It's also unnecessary on an image (use |center within the image markup) or on a <gallery> (add class=center). --Redrose64 (talk) 00:27, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Template Help - Global Way of Centering Group Titles - or not?

QUESTION: At the moment, I'm able to "center" each template Group Title within a template "box" as follows: < center>Group1 title< /center> => < center>Group2 Title< /center> => and so on - BUT - Is there some "Global" way of centering *all* Group Titles in a template more easily - by adding some particular code (or equivalent) to the template source code? - in any case - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 13:33, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Add |groupstyle=text-align: center and remove the obsolete <center> tags. See {{Moon spacecraft}}. --  Gadget850 talk 14:04, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
@Gadget850 - Thank you *very much* for your suggestions - they are *very much* appreciated - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 14:08, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
@Gadget850 - BRIEF Followup => Seems your suggestion *centers* the title for "Groups" very well - but does not seem to *center* the titles for "Subgroups" - is there additional code to *center* the titles for "Subgroups" as well - Thanking you in advance for your reply - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 14:20, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
Each subgroup is invoked through {{navbox subgroup}} which has its own |groupstyle=; it is not inherited from {{navbox}}. --  Gadget850 talk 14:28, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
Yes - Thanks again for your help with this - it's *very much* appreciated - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 14:56, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Could someone help me with humanification of a code from {{Mars Quads - By Name}}? This template is a technical disaster, and has many obsolete tags. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 15:43, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

I converted <center> to the appropriate markup within the <div>. --  Gadget850 talk 16:02, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the {{Mars Quads - By Name}} update as well - it's *very much* appreciated - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 18:49, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Database reports

Many of the reports listed at Wikipedia:Database reports have not been generated for quite some time, due to the Toolserver shutdown. In particular I am concerned about the "Unused non-free files" (has not run since August 3) and the "Large non-free files" (has not run since March 29). There's likely thousands or even tens of thousands of files in the collection that no longer meet the non-free content guidelines and need to be deleted. Any help getting these reports generated again on a regular basis would be greatly appreciated. -- Diannaa (talk) 18:55, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

@Diannaa: I'm not familiar with the reports, but surely they could be easily adapted to run with Quarry, which is the new Labs-hosted hotness for running SQL queries. I tried it with the "Unused non-free files" one – the query is still running, but everything seems to work and when it finishes, you should be able to see the results at http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/851. Matma Rex talk 19:14, 29 October 2014 (UTC) Oh hey, it actually just finished. There are 1453 pages in the result. Matma Rex talk 19:16, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, that's awesome. Is there any way the results could be brought over so that interested parties can easily tag the files for deletion? -- Diannaa (talk) 19:20, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
@Diannaa: I've already copied them over to Wikipedia:Database reports/Unused non-free files. (This was done manually this time, but it definitely could be automated, if only anyone has the time for this – alas I don't.) Matma Rex talk 19:53, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks so much. Is there any way you could have a look at the "Large non-free files" as well? I would really appreciate it. -- Diannaa (talk) 20:01, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
@Diannaa: Done: http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/853 and updated Wikipedia:Database reports/Large non-free files. I needed to adapt this query a bit. Matma Rex talk 23:14, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
The backlog is not as extreme as I expected, quite manageable. Thank you very much for your help with this. -- Diannaa (talk) 23:41, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
There's also http://tools.wmflabs.org/betacommand-dev/reports/orfu.txt which is updated daily. Nick (talk) 23:46, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Nick, I will have a close look at it tomorrow, as it seems to include some images not present on the other list. -- Diannaa (talk) 02:36, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
@Matma Rex: Any chance you could take a peek at my unanswered posts at the bottom of Wikipedia talk:Database reports? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:38, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
@GoingBatty: Sorry, I don't really know what to do to change the report configuration. Perhaps you should contact the maintainers directly, whoever that is. Matma Rex talk 08:15, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Problem with Huggle?

I try to use Huggle 2.1.21 after a break during a couple of months, and not manage to log in. Failed to load configuration page:Formatting of continuation data will be changing soon. To continue using (...). This is the message I see. In portuguese version the same phenomenon goes on. Does someone know what's this? E. Feld talk 00:39, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

@Eduardofeld: According to WP:HG, bug reports should be made here. Have you done that? --Redrose64 (talk) 08:17, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Done. Thanks. E. Feld talk 09:27, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Fix a problem with What Links Here?

On the Wikipedia of ten years ago, the What Links Here utility was extremely useful -- it led you to a quite relevant set of related articles. These included articles whose existence you would otherwise never become aware of, because the article you were reading didn't yet link to them. Then, WP editors started putting in navigation templates everywhere. The result is that the What Links Here function acquired a huge number of irrelevant links. Reason: every article that transcludes the template links to every article mentioned on the template -- even when there is no logical connection.

If you're curious, try this example: go to Mozart and scatology, click on What Links Here, and you'll get a huge number of hits, because Mozart and scatology is mentioned on the Mozart navigation template, which has been transcluded 266 times on the English Wikipedia. Most of these hits are completely irrelevant; you have to comb through them to find the few legitimate inbound links, such as Difficile lectu (Mozart).

So I ask: would it be desirable/feasible to exclude Template:X entries from the What Links Here links? Opus33 (talk) 00:59, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

It's a frequent request but non-trivial and it has not been implemented. See for example Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 122#WhatLinksHere overwhelmed by links in navigation templates. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:52, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for letting me know. Opus33 (talk) 02:24, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
It's not feasible to implement this. No matter how we did it, there would either be a lot of false positives, a lot of false negatives, or both. It would also require rewriting how the parser works, since it currently expands all templates before it handles wikilinks. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:53, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you. Opus33 (talk) 16:48, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
A technique for finding direct links to a page is to search for the term within page sources only using CirrusSearch's insource. A regex search could limit the search to wikilinks only: insource:/\[\[\s*Mozart and scatology\s*(\|.*)?\]\]/. Regex search does not appear to work perfectly though: \s often matches a literal "s" instead of whitespace. SiBr4 (talk) 15:50, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
This worked beautifully, thanks so much. I noticed that CirrusSearch is still in beta, but I think it would great if your idea was implemented as the basis for a new What Links Here once CirrusSearch is up and running on WP. Opus33 (talk) 16:48, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Max archive size?

Any thoughts regarding the technical limitations of talk page archive size would be welcomed, here. VQuakr (talk) 07:38, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Linking

I cannot work out from WP:LINKING how to make the blue link "Prose instead of flags?" in the "Logos" section connect with the right section in the ISIS Talk page. I thought I had put in the appropriate wikicode but the link does not work. How is that done, please? --P123ct1 (talk) 13:16, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

By adding "see also Logos" to the section heading "Prose instead of flags" you changed the name of the section so your link won't work. If you want to cross reference the two section with text then put it underneath the heading not as part of it. Nthep (talk) 13:28, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict)I don't really understand what you are trying to do. Are you trying to link the titles mutually? While that seems like a very interesting general problem, the simple answer is "don't do that then", and link in the body of the section, rather than in the section title itself. (regardless, I'm intrigued, and will come back on this. Still, the answer will be "don't do that") Or do you mean something else? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 13:30, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Talk:Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has 38 sections and four sub-sections. Which of these is "the right section in the ISIS Talk page"? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:34, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
The page tries to link two section headings to eachother with this as the section headings:
Prose instead of flags? (See also #Logos)
Logos (See also #Prose instead of flags?)
It doesn't work because you have to link to the whole title of the other section heading, including the small part. And even though it would be possible to only link one way, or link both ways by inserting anchors, don't use section headings for this. It's confusing, it gives ugly automatic section edit summaries, it breaks old links to the sections when you add "see also ..." later, it makes it hard to manually make links to the sections, it breaks when the sections are archived at different times, and so on. Lots of problems and very little benefit compared to making the link at the start of the section. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:00, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
And we have {{section link}} to make this a bit simpler. --  Gadget850 talk 16:22, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Pending requested move

Comments etc here, to determine an outcome, would be welcome. Sardanaphalus (talk) 18:26, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

User:Blueye

Hi. I'm Polish Wikipedian for many years. Some years ago I unify my account on all versions and error appear only in english version and doesnt create my accout. I've try to solve this problem asking for help administration in Polish and English Wiki but no one can help. Maybe now someone can solve it now? I sign as it should be but the easiest way to contact me is via https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyskusja_wikipedysty:Blueye --89.71.65.202 (talk) 19:55, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Please, make a request at meta:Steward requests/Username changes. Ruslik_Zero 20:17, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
The account Blueye at the English Wikipedia was created back in 2007 but did never edit anything. As far as I can tell the unified login was introduced much later so I guess this another user's account. You might want to usurp it though. De728631 (talk) 20:22, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Media Viewer Update: New Improvements

 
Media Viewer's new user interface, with 'More details' button.
 
Prominent Disable/Enable tools make it easy to turn Media Viewer on and off

Hi folks: we're happy to let you know that our multimedia team has released many new improvements to Media Viewer in recent weeks, based on community feedback.

Here are some of the new features that are now live on the English Wikipedia:

You can try out these features on this 'Featured pictures' page.

Next, we are working on these last 'must-have' improvements for this release:

(Note that the layout change above has just been released for testing on MediaWiki.org.)

These features are based on the most frequent requests from our recent community consultation and ongoing user research. For more information, visit the Media Viewer Improvements page -- or the Help FAQ page.

Many thanks to all the community members who suggested these improvements. Our research so far confirms that they provide a better experience for readers and casual editors, the primary target users for Media Viewer.

Please let us know what you think on this Media Viewer discussion page. We will post one more update in mid-November, once all improvements have been released and tested. Best regards. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 22:49, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Extracting PMIDs

Hi folks, relaying a question from a Stanford Medical researcher:

"Do you know if it is possible to extract [all] PubMed ID (PMID) or PMCIDs from Wiki references? Furthermore, could you dump those IDs out into a list for analysis?"

Thanks, Jake Ocaasi t | c 03:53, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Hey Ocaasi. Seems like an easy job. Can you give me a few examples of PMIDs in articles and talk to me about the form they take (e.g. always a 25 digit number -- or something like that)? --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 22:37, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
After a bit of searching around, it looks like they can be extracted with a regex pretty nicely. E.g. /\bpmid *= *[0-9]+\b/i Does that seem right? --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 22:42, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
@EpochFail: I don't know regex but something like that should work. We'd want to know which PMIDs came from which article ideally. And then we'd need to dump it all in a list. Any idea what the workflow/toolset needed for something like this would be? Thanks and cheers, Ocaasi t | c 02:41, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
  Done I've finished a crawl over the XML dumps for 2014-10-08. You can find it here: http://datasets.wikimedia.org/public-datasets/enwiki/etc/pmids.articles.20141008.tsv It includes page_id, page_namespace, page_title, rev_id (most recent), pmid in TAB separated values. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 12:24, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
edit Fixed the link to the dataset. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 13:44, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
User:EpochFail, can you combine that with a list to the ones that use URLs in the http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/nnnnnnn format, or to PubMedCentral pages? There are multiple ways to link these papers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:26, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
Hey WhatamIdoing. Just so that I understand, are you asking me to also extract PMIDs that appear in certain types of URLs? If that's right, I'd be happy to, but I'd request that someone else do the digging for the different URL structures. I can update the regular expressions as necessary so long as I have examples. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 12:43, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
EpochFail, that's the format: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/nnnnnnn where nnnnnnn is the PMID number (always plain numbers) itself. (The number of digits varies from one to eight, because it's sequential, but it's usually seven or eight. They've assigned a bit more than 25.3 million so far.)
It appears that there is another format, but the PMID number isn't visible at all in it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=B1+and+B2+cells+differ+in+their+potential+to+switch+immunoglobulin+isotype. will take you to the same article. This is actually search results that returned exactly one possible match, and therefore took the user to the single match. Short of writing something to look up the original database record, I think you'll want to just skip these. They're rare anyway.
At PubMedCentral, the URL format is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMCnnnnnnn/ PMCID numbers do not match PMID numbers. In {{cite journal}}, you would write |pmc=nnnnnnn (just the numbers), although I believe that the official PMCID is PMCnnnnnnn. If someone has done a good job with the citations, then you might have both a PMID and the corresponding PMCID present in the same citation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:33, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
I just updated the dataset (same URL) to flag which IDs are pmc and which are pmid. I also included the URL scheme, but it doesn't seem to have added a substantial amount of new IDs. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 16:41, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
Parsing for the |pmid= parameter (must allow |PMID= as well) within citation templates should find about 479,000 cites covering 319,000 distinct PMIDs on en-wiki. Plus maybe 1100 with PMC only. Though that will miss about 18000 plain PMIDs (use of PMID 12345 as PMID is a wiki magic word) and some number of URLs. But I think the number where there is a URL but no PMID in a cite or plain PMID in the same ref is a few hundred at the most. Rjwilmsi 17:45, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Linking a sub-template problem

I'm working on a template for Wikidata-focused infoboxes and have a dummy problem. I'm not able to link sub-template - User:Rezonansowy/Infobox publication/val, my code looks like: 

{{/val|author|50}}

It works for example on Wikipedia:Article wizard. Like this: {{/subtemplate}} ...but doesn't work when I link this template containing sub-template to another page, example. I got redlink insted of sub-template.

--Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 18:04, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

For subpages transcluded by a relative path, it's always relative to the top-level page, not relative to the page where the wikicode is. So it thinks that you want to transclude Animal Farm/val. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:42, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
It doesn't seem to work the right way, IMO it's a bug. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 19:00, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
It works as intended. It would sometimes be nice if there was a way to tell where code was transcluded from but there isn't. In your case there is a trivial fix: Give the full pagename. By the way, mainspace doesn't have subpages so {{/val}} in mainspace interprets /val as a template name. That's why the red link is Template:/val. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:32, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
@Rezonansowy: If I understand correctly that the goal is to transclude User:Rezonansowy/Infobox publication/val in User:Rezonansowy/Infobox publication, why not just give the full pathname:

     {{User:Rezonansowy/Infobox publication/val|author|50}}

Better still, the following is more flexible and won't require editing if you rename the "parent" template, which is more like the "relative pathname" functionality for which I think you were looking:

     {{{{#invoke:TEMPLATENAME|main}}/val|author|50}}

—[AlanM1(talk)]— 08:49, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Strange time substitution

{{#time:j F Y|~~~~~}} displays properly: 30 October 2014.

With substitution, i.e. {{subst:#time:j F Y|~~~~~}}, it looks wrong: Error: Invalid time..

What is the reason for this? Shouldn't the substituted and the unsubstituted versions work identically? --Stefan2 (talk) 00:14, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

@Stefan2: It looks like the substitution is happening before the tildes get expanded. Because of this, #time is complaining that five tildes in a row aren't a valid time. As a workaround, just use {{subst:#time:j F Y}}, which properly produces 30 October 2014. In fact, passing ~~~~~ to #time is always redundant and should be removed, since the default value of the second parameter is the current time. Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:20, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
And if for some reason you do need to explicitly say "the current type", use "now": {{#time:j F Y|now}}. Anomie⚔ 14:19, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Edit Counters missing data

Various reports have been made in the last week or so about the Xtools edit counter being down. While it seems to be operational again since a day or two I noticed that edit data from October 24 and following days appears to be missing. Example 1) I made 8 edits to the Rod Laver article on October 27 (see [revision history]) but these do not show up in the [Revision history statistics] or [Edits by user] overviews. Example 2) I made 18 edits to the All England Plate article on October 25 which do not show in the [Revision history statistics] or [Edits by user] and also do not appear on my user edit count overview (Contributions > Edit count > Top edited pages section). Note that the edits on October 24 (and the one on October 29) have been captured. Is this a known issue and will it be repaired?--Wolbo (talk) 02:16, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

This may be the same issue that I reported here. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:14, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Perhaps. I reported the issue at Github but was informed that it was not a specific Xtools issue because other tools, like [Edits by user], also showed missing data and that it had "something to do with Labs Replication DBs". So are there people here who can take this issue on or else point me to the right place to follow-up? Thx.--Wolbo (talk) 20:46, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Any help available on this or should it be reported somewhere else? --Wolbo (talk) 15:23, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Problem with adding the first interwiki to a page

Clicking on the "Add links" link (in the interwikis block) on a page which currently has no interwikis is producing a popup box with an error in it (that looks like a JavaScript object). I've tested on a few random articles with the same result. Originally reported here, but this will need someone more familiar with the scripting around Wikidata to look at it. --ais523 04:17, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

I just got this error too while trying to add a link from the German version of Coin of the Year Award, but logging out and back in again fixed it for me. Graham87 09:11, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
Logging out and back in didn't fix it for me, so probably there's some other factor involved. --ais523 11:32, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Monospace font-size

Re this, has something like a "default monospace font-size" setting been considered as a user preference..? Sardanaphalus (talk) 09:40, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
PS {{Mono}}'s default size setting is 1.2em (120%), which, relatively speaking, looks a bit large here (Firefox-based browser).

Unfortunately, for as far as fonts go, "firefox-based browser" is insufficient information - it's the specific font that's rendered that counts, which can depend on the fonts you have installed, default settings in your browser, and the magical way browsers choose fonts. I'm not saying 1.2em must be perfect, and I'm no font wizard. Introducing and implementing a new setting for this, to me, feels wrong, and {{mono}} would override that again. I'm not sure what the "right" size for that template would be. Maybe you can make some testcases and discuss on the template itself. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 20:28, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Reference lists on talk pages

Hi, the problem of reference lists automatically and inappropriately appearing at the bottom of talk pages, next to threads that normally will be completely unconnected with them, was mentioned a while ago but still it has not been fixed. References need to be turned off by default on talk pages, and only included if specifically requested by an editor, in which case they need to appear at the bottom of the relevant section of text, not at the bottom of the page. Does anyone know the current status of this problem? 109.147.188.227 (talk) 13:45, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

See the bug list at Help:Automatically generated reference list. There seems to be no work on namespace detection. --  Gadget850 talk 22:25, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Bot or tool to keep the record of dead links

Is there any active bot of tool which searches pages for dead links and put a message somewhere in any Wiki Project sub page.--Skr15081997 (talk) 14:14, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

There's User:Dispenser/Checklinks. It'll be upgraded in the coming months along with Reflinks, right now life issues are interfering. — Dispenser 14:23, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

All sections not showing up on WP:RFD - too many, so possible technical issue

I noticed that on WP:RFD, the last two page transclusions, Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 September 4 and Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 September 5, aren't showing either on the page or the table of contents. I assume that is due to either the amount of transclusions or sections currently on the page, and this why I'm thinking that this is a technical issue. Is there a way this issue can be fixed? Steel1943 (talk) 22:53, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

When I click show preview, I get the message
"Warning: Template include size is too large. Some templates will not be included.
Warning: This page contains too many expensive parser function calls.
It should have less than 500 calls, there are now 604 calls."
If I remove a few of the October pages, it starts working again. So it seems your guess is correct: too many transclusions or too long. Stickee (talk) 01:05, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Ah, now take a look at this: 

<p><a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2014_September_5" title="Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 September 5">Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 September 5</a>
<!-- WARNING: template omitted, post-expand include size too large -->
<a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2014_September_4" title="Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 September 4">Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 September 4</a>
<!-- WARNING: template omitted, post-expand include size too large --></p>

<!-- 
NewPP limit report
Parsed by mw1051
CPU time usage: 17.977 seconds
Real time usage: 18.881 seconds
Preprocessor visited node count: 43140/1000000
Preprocessor generated node count: 65050/1500000
Post‐expand include size: 2048000/2048000 bytes
Template argument size: 57216/2048000 bytes
Highest expansion depth: 12/40
Expensive parser function count: 607/500
Lua time usage: 0.712/10.000 seconds
Lua memory usage: 4.33 MB/50 MB
-->

MediaWiki is saying you've exceeded the post-expand include size limit. In other words: it's too long. Update: After asking on IRC, your solutions are either to split it into multiple pages or find another way of decreasing the size. Stickee (talk) 01:29, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, if you click "Page information" under "Tools" or enable "Show hidden categories" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering then you can see it is in both Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded and Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:34, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
The expensive parser function hit is coming from Template:No redirect, which uses #ifexist to decide whether to output a red link or an internal URL with redirect=no. Maybe we should remove this check? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 04:18, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
re Mr. Strad: With this removal, can we add a "no redirect" as an unchecked (non-expensive) link to the {{Tfd links}} list? -DePiep (talk) 17:16, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Pending changes block

I'm working on a 'pending changes block' proposal that is to classic block what pending changes protection is to classic protection. My draft is at User:Cenarium/PCB and I welcome any input on the technical feasibility and ease of implementation before going ahead with the proposal. The technical details are covered here specifically. Cenarium (talk) 23:44, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

My edits?

I just learned about this tool (direct tool link) and made few changes, but I can't find my edits in "my global contribution" or anywhere. Any idea? --Tito☸Dutta 07:20, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Your edits are on Wikidata, see d:Special:Contributions/Titodutta. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 08:56, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
  • Yes, but I can not see my recent edits (using this tool) there. I was wondering, that's why, where are "#My edits?" Regards. --Tito☸Dutta 09:17, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Did you actually make the Wikidata edits as described in your link "this tool"? If you only clicked "Yes" in the tool to say that two shown articles are about the same topic then it doesn't make edits but it logs your clicks at http://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/checkbylist.php. When you are logged in you can see your own clicks by selecting "checked list" in the drop-down box. If you are not familiar with interlanguage linking at Wikidata then it can be non-trivial to sort out some situations when you make the actual edits. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:54, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Automatically mark spelling errors as errors

Not going anywhere, since people don't bother to read the proposal

I want to suggest something at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), but I don't know if it's possible without major assistance from developers, so I figured I'd check here to see if we could implement it locally.

Right now, if you have a link to a misspelling, it's treated as any other link: Geroge Bush works just as well as George Bush. It's easy to notice some spelling errors (e.g. New Yokr) because they don't exist as redirects, but once we've created a redirect to help correct spelling errors, this little benefit disappears. What if we had some way of marking misspellings as misspellings? I'm imagining the software auto-placing {{copy edit}} after a misspelling under the following conditions:

  • It's a direct link, without piping: [[Pensylvania]] gets marked, but not [[Oregroun|Idaho's Portugal]] or [[Buckeye State|Ohoi]]. When the link is piped, we don't need to worry about misspellings, since they won't be noticed by the casual reader anyway, while the system can't determine that the displayed text (e.g. "Ohoi") is indeed a misspelling.
  • The redirect is marked with {{R from misspelling}}.
  • The redirect is not encased in {{notatypo}}. I can't imagine why, but you might have a good reason to link Pensylvania, and we don't want such a link to be marked as a typo when it's intentional.
  • The redirect is located on a mainspace page. There's no need for this discussion to be marked, for example.

Is this idea possible, perhaps via a modification to the site JS? Or if not, would it be reasonable to have a bot that tags (or fixes) such links? Spellchecking bots are a bad idea in general, but that's because they can't understand contexts; it's impossible for them to know that "Ohoi" is a mistake for "Ohio" and not a reference to something else. In my limited proposal, no context is required, since a human's already tagged Unites States as a misspelling after determining that it is a mistake. Nyttend (talk) 18:36, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

It might not be advisable to get a bot to fix them though as some redirects marked as misspellings might not be a misspelling and should have that tag removed. Or imagine a vandal going around and adding the misspelling tag to various redirects and then a bot going around and editing lots of articles to fix those misspellings when they were not. However, there is a report at Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings though which can be used to manually fix articles for those that feel inclined. -- WOSlinker (talk) 18:46, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Good point on the fixing itself. What about simply tagging, however? The database report is comparatively obscure, and how many people know about it, aside from dedicated typo-fixers? If a link is tagged, either directly by the software, or by a bot, it will be noticed by everyone. This is the kind of thing that is capable of drawing in additional editors: newbies often wonder how they can contribute, and if we auto-mark spelling errors, it will be a good indication to the casual reader of something that can easily be fixed. Nyttend (talk) 19:09, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
IMHO a simpler solution is to get rid of the redirects, or get them to appear as redlinks. The more redirects there are, the worse the spelling in WP articles becomes. This is because people see that a redirect for a mis-spelling forms a blue or green link (I seem to recall green links only show to logged in users), assume it is right, and repeat the same mis-spelliing throughout the article.
I know this is not popular, but keeping incorrectly spelt (yes, that is correct in UK English) articles as redirects, leads to more uses of the same misspelling, as editors copy the spelling in a blue or green link, whereas, if it came up as a red-link they would, at least, be more likely to check.
As an example, I spend a lot of time on misspellings of "rhythm" - such as rhythim, rhythym, rhytm, rythm and blues and rythm guitar to name but a few, which could largely be avoided if they produced a red-link instead of a green one. - Arjayay (talk) 19:14, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Not a good idea: someone who goes to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geroge or searches for Geroge has almost certainly intended to reach the George page, so we ought to send them there. Facilitating searchers and people who go directly to URLs is more important than fighting typos. Nyttend (talk) 19:22, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Not a PoV I can agree with, as it makes WP look so amateur. - Arjayay (talk) 19:34, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Beside the fact that your view is in the minority, this is not a forum for discussing priorities; I'm looking for technical input on what's possible and what's not possible. Nyttend (talk) 21:23, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
This I think is a case of enthusiasm taking over from common sense. When we talk of about letting a bot loose- we have to have a firm algorithm in mind. Not withstanding in UK:ENG we have two alternative spelling for many word depending if you use the Oxford model or the Cambridge model- The area where I work has spellings that are artificial anglicisations of German place names when in truth they have never been modified in the first place, zB Thuringen. George Frideric Handel is a lovely case in point- yes we mean Georg Handel or was it Georg Friedrich Händel. I do agree that providing redirects to help users with clumbsy fingers is wrong- but would probably lose the debate over not making Equal Ops for the disabled, so I will stay stum (schtum) on that. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 21:38, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
I think this is drifting away from the point. Nobody proposed to add copy-editing templates to all redirects. When you mention the various spellings of Handel, none of those would be marked as a misspelling. I would certainly support there being a better way to mark known misspellings, perhaps as input for improving Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings. I'm just not sure a bot is the right way to do it, given that bots can be disruptive when they go wrong, and the case of someone trolling the bot as WOSlinker described is one way it could go wrong. Also, the FAQ here says "No, we will not add a spell-checking bot". rspεεr (talk) 21:48, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
If you had read my original statement, you would have observed that this indeed has a rigid algorithm: bot only marks or changes things that are marked as misspellings by humans. If you had read the spellchecking chunk of WP:FDB, you would have observed that spellchecking bots are denied because they cannot account for the context, while this is a situation in which the context has already been established by humans. Clearly this has no way of surviving opposition from the ignorant and biassed, so I won't waste my time trying to help here. Your failure to read carefully and your opposition to our standard practice is most unhelpful. Nyttend (talk) 22:03, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Xtools / edit counter

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74104

Does anyone here know the status of the Xtools edit counter? I have been unable to access the tool for several days, and this does not appear to be one of the usual temporary service interruptions. Does anyone know anything about this? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 14:12, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

All Xtools have been down for some days. See #Wikimedia Tool Labs and bugzilla:72104. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:18, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
I have mentioned it's down in the interface message Template:Sp-contributions-footer.[46] I did the same yesterday for MediaWiki:Histlegend.[47] PrimeHunter (talk) 14:27, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
If you go to the Github report you see: "Labels: None! No milestones! Nobody assigned!" The Bugzilla thread is equally discouraging: "Unprioritized! Assigned to nobody!" Except for Wikiviewstats, trying to use any of these tools does not even produce an error message, just a blank screen endlessly showing "Waiting for tools.wmflabs.org". (See the thread above, "Wikimedia Tool Labs", for some of the problems caused for users). Well I think this is not good enough for a facility used by many thousands. How do we jog Wikimedia to get going and resolve this?: Noyster (talk), 08:43, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
@Dirtlawyer1, PrimeHunter, and Noyster: Looks like the counter is operational again. GoingBatty (talk) 15:16, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Great! I have removed the down messages from Template:Sp-contributions-footer and MediaWiki:Histlegend after testing the three linked xtools. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:14, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: I'm a writer/editor, not a wiki-coder tech guy. When there are problems with X tools (or other Wikimedia Lab Tools), where is the appropriate interface to go with questions? Once upon a time, we could go to X!'s talk page . . . . Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:29, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

@Dirtlawyer1: This page seemed to work pretty well for you. GoingBatty (talk) 15:38, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
  • (edit conflict) For X! tools, there are a few maintainers... The best ways to do it is post the issue on bugzilla (phabricator soon replacing this), on github (here), or ask a maintainer: Cyberpower678, Hedonil and Tparis (may be more, not sure). — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:41, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
  • One more question: pardon my ignorance, but what is the relationship of Phabricator and Bugzilla to Wikimedia Labs? I don't wander outside of English Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons very often, so all of these support groups are a bit of a mystery to me. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:53, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Bugzilla is the old system for reporting bugs (including feature requests and random ideas). Phabricator is the soon-to-be new system for reporting bugs and also lots of other things that could be done in Bugzilla, but which Bugzilla is not exactly very convenient for, like figuring out what's going on or planning projects. In the old (aka current) system, you find a problem on wiki, you report it at Bugzilla, some (volunteer or staff) dev decides to fix it, the dev's code goes to Gerritt, and then (with luck, assuming that the rather picky Jenkins bot doesn't reject your code, etc.) it somehow shows up in the MediaWiki software that we're using. Bugzilla is going to "go away" Any Day Now™, meaning probably within the next few weeks. Unless it doesn't.
WMF Labs is the replacement for Toolserver. It's a place to put useful or interesting stuff that people are using. NB that people specify "WMF Labs" to prevent confusion with "Beta Labs", which is a test wiki. http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/ will take you to a partial copy of the English Wikipedia, where you can see what some of the devs have broken this week are working on right now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:37, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
The replacement for Toolserver is specifically Tool Labs; Wikimedia Labs is the larger project that Beta Labs, Tool Labs, and a large number of other non-production services and test servers are a part of. Anomie⚔ 11:43, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Well, perhaps this is the problem: TParis has lost access to their account, Cyberpower687 has been on WikiBreak for two months, and Hedonil hasn't made an edit since 20 August. I guess this won't get fixed any time soon. Curly Turkey ⚞¡gobble!⚟ 06:18, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Well someone has gotten my attention about this issue, so I will be taking a look over the next few days. ALSO IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT GITHUB IS THE BEST PLACE TO REPORT BUGS AS IT IS THERE WE CAN MOST EASILY KEEP TRACK OF THE BUGS. I am no way shouting, but making trying to make that statement standout for future bug reports.—cyberpower Temporarily OnlineTrick or Treat 11:48, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
It works two ways. There are replies to the bug report here and at bugzilla:72104 but none of the two reports at https://github.com/x-Tools/xtools/issues/. I think most bug reporters like to at least know whether their report has been seen. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:34, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Search for special chars

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T74381

Is it possible to request search queries for phrases containing special chars? For example: HTML tags, like <center>. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 14:23, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Any ideas? --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 12:10, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
The only way I know to do this is to download the database then use AWB to search. Goggle, Bing and the others just plain ignore punctuation marks. --  Gadget850 talk 12:58, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
You can use CirrusSearch's insource:// syntax to perform a regex match against the page source. Unfortunately its pretty busted right now from a performance standpoint. Fortunately I'm in the process of making it much faster. I imagine that'll take a week or so to finish though. If you need it sooner I can see if I can do some juggling to get it better just for enwiki. I don't imagine I'd be able to do the juggling faster then about 24 hours though. NEverett (WMF) (talk) 20:24, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
I tracked a little bug on it. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 20:42, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
I replied to the bug with more in depth information. Filing the bug with the link to here is what got my attention in the first place. NEverett (WMF) (talk) 21:51, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
@NEverett (WMF): I have a trouble with searching using insource://. Could you tell me how to search for pages containing HTML <center> tags? --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 19:48, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
@Rezonansowy: It should be insource:/\<center\>/. Right now we're having a CirrusSearch outage so its not available but it should be soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.NEverett (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Anyone could help?--Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 10:11, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

You would have to enable the new search first. Then see mw:Help:CirrusSearch. I was testing this yesterday and kept getting errors. Today CirrusSearch seems to be disabled. --  Gadget850 talk 14:23, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

@NEverett (WMF) and Gadget850: Many thanks for reply! --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 19:32, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

@Rezonansowy:, @Gadget850: give it another shot now. Its still not quick (30 seconds for me) but its possible. I'm getting the message about there being too many regex searches going at a time more than I ought to be as well. I'll investigate that but in the mean time just retry and it should go through. I'll have a look at the speed at some point as well. Because there are so many pages with <center> you are likely going to encounter bugzilla:72128 when you do this. The number of pages is probably also why it takes so long. NEverett (WMF) (talk) 16:21, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Seems to be working properly now, given the limitation noted in the bug report. Thanks! --  Gadget850 talk 16:49, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
@NEverett (WMF) and Gadget850: Today, "insource:" is being ignored; – "bitterly-"insource:/[ \(\[][Bb]itterly-/ – simply returns the same results as "bitterly-". Chris the speller yack 15:54, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
I have noted that CirrusSearch is up and down periodically over the last week. --  Gadget850 talk 16:10, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Yeah - we had to disable insource:// support for a little while. I sent an email to wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org but neglected to post anything here. Sorry! Certain regex searches were able to bring the whole system down! My guess is it'll take a week or so for us to get it sorted out properly. I'm really sorry for the delay!NEverett (WMF) (talk) 23:26, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Wmflabs tool

Is this tool open source? If is not it risk to be deleted like the original "reflinks"? 82.77.75.167 (talk) 00:18, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

The original Reflinks was open sourced, just the WMF didn't want to come to terms with me. As for Kolossos's tool, he's accepted WMF's coercive terms. However, the code quality isn't good and lacks optimization, but otherwise works. — Dispenser 16:43, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
So, where i can see source code of Templatetiger? I think not all tools from wmflabs are open source. 82.77.75.167 (talk) 21:02, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Likely only in Labs itself as Kolossos doesn't like to use version control. You could ask him for the code. Or easily create a Tool Labs account (I'd say too easily) and peak at it, or hop on irc:wikimedia-labs and ask User:Coren to give it. I'd help out more, but I'm serving an unjustified ban. — Dispenser 22:15, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

How to peak at it? I tried, unsuccessfully. (i am Windows user). Can someone make a video tutorial for me, please?:) I think it will be usefull in time not only for me. Thank you. 82.77.75.167 (talk) 22:15, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Hello, my sourcecode is available here. I believe it's not very useful without databases on wmflabs. For further questions you can contact me: kolossos_Ät_wikipedia.de .--Kolossos (talk) 19:01, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you. You're right. Without knowing the structure of directories and DB dumps this source it's not very useful, at least for me.
Can Wmflabs admins make possible to view and browse directories and files from Wmflabs directly via browser? 82.77.75.167 (talk) 02:21, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
There is some documentation available. I don't believe that admins will make directories readable, also if would support this. --Kolossos (talk) 19:12, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Coordinates problem again

The site-wide problem described above at #Coordinates display appears to be broken has recurred, as of about 11:20 UTC on this date. Can someone please report it to Bugzilla (former ticket was 72559), as I don't have a Bugzilla account? Deor (talk) 11:31, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm seeing the same. Looks like Andyrom75 reopened ticket 72559 as of 11:58 today. -- chris_j_wood (talk) 12:25, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
Can't reproduce now. Try to purge the page if you see it again? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:28, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
Purge seems to fix it now, though it didn't at around 12:00 today. --David Biddulph (talk) 13:35, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
Agreed, it now seems to be fixed, once the containing page is purged. That most certainly wasn't the case at 12:25. -- chris_j_wood (talk) 13:58, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
(A few links about this issue: [48], [49], [50], [51]. Best, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:24, 3 November 2014 (UTC))

mobile issue

Wikimedia was contacted Ticket:2014103110016121 with the observation that Dan Maffei seems fine except in mobile browsers. I tried Mobile Dan Maffei but it looks fine, here, and on my Android.

I will ask that person to respond here with more info. What is needed? Type of phone? OS? Anything else?--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:52, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

A description of the issue would be nice. In addition to that, the type of phone, OS and which mobile browser would also be good to know. A screenshot of the problem can make it easier to understand the issue as well. (I'm not seeing any problems under Chrome for Android and Android Browser by the way) Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 18:00, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
Oh, and whether this is wikipedia on the browser, or the wikipedia app. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 18:00, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
screenshot I see that the person hasn't followed up, although it is election day, so has other things to do at the moment.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:31, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

How to embedded a font for a single page?

There are articles about standard Unicode Blocks. Many of them represent symbols and are not real part of a special language, or they are part of a dead language : Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Miao (Unicode block) Ornamental Dingbats Transport and Map Symbols Alchemical Symbols (Unicode block) Bamum Supplement Geometric Shapes Extended Old South Arabian (Unicode block) Old North Arabian (Unicode block) Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Unicode block) Supplemental Arrows-C Emoticons (Unicode block) Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement.

Most Peoples who browse them won't be able to see a single single glyph, especially on embedded devices. This make them useless, as long as no fonts are included on the page (I know a set of free fonts which can be legally used for this).
Current dedicated extension, can't print those glyph, and for sure it would not be relevant to load Mo of data on each page to tell how a web browser should draw Water Closets or the Statue of Liberty. 2A02:8420:508D:CC00:56E6:FCFF:FEDB:2BBA (talk) 13:51, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Unicode block) and similar articles use {{infobox writing system}} which notes the issue and links to Help:Special characters. The alternative would be to add the font set as an image. --  Gadget850 talk 14:33, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Yes, and Help:Special characters tell to download appropriate fonts. This will never work on many mobile phones. Also, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs and Ornamental Dingbats Transport and Map Symbols don't use {{infobox writing system}}. 2A02:8420:508D:CC00:56E6:FCFF:FEDB:2BBA (talk) 14:39, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
There was a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Writing systems/Archive 9#Backup images of alphabet charts. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:46, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
There is some webfonts discussions on mw:Universal Language Selector/WebFonts as well. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 15:28, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Yes, and since, the possibility to use an image as a glyph (vectorial or raster) have been deprecated. Chrome already removed support. and mw:Universal Language Selector/WebFonts can't help since most of those glyph aren't part of any language
I made the Egyptian Hieroglyphs somewhat better, by editing Template:Unicode chart Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Enwiki does have hieroglyph markup support, which I did use to fix that, but as you can see it is far from being perfect. At least though it is better to see some hieroglyphs than none. You can file a bug for the remaining hieroglyphs on bugzilla, under the product MediaWiki extensions and the component WikiHiero.--Snaevar (talk) 10:39, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
I don't have a bugzilla account. 2A02:8420:508D:CC00:56E6:FCFF:FEDB:2BBA (talk) 15:43, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
Somewhat ironically, that is tracked in https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148 (from 2004). I think that the migration to Phabricator will allow more non-logged in nicities, but don't hold me to that. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 13:13, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Template help needed

Because a template has been nominated for deletion, it has somehow broken the template and made a mess wherever it is used. Can someone tech savoy please look at this chart and demonstrate how to fix the problem. Thanks.—John Cline (talk) 22:13, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

I'm now unbreaking the eleven templates by converting the TfD notices to inline-type notices within the table cells the templates create. SiBr4 (talk) 22:43, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Done. Should look a lot better now. SiBr4 (talk) 22:53, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The templates could be modified to put the {{Template for discussion/dated}} inside a <noinclude>...</noinclude>, but that would mean that many people would be unaware that the templates were up for deletion until they suddenly disappeared. If a convincing case can be made at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2014 November 1#Hotcold templates for speedy keep, the notice can be removed earlier than the standard week or six that TfDs take. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:44, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
I appreciate the effort that both of you gave to help me understand what had happened to break the template's output, and for correcting the code to restore its functionality with wiki goodwill and speed. And for observing such fine examples of selfless service, I am uplifted; going now, upon high, to tell it on the mountain – so others can know of the good work that was done here today! Thank you.—John Cline (talk) 10:07, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

data-sort-value

Does anybody know why the alpha sorting isn't working at List of artists who have covered Bob Dylan songs. I am using data-sort-value. Have I missed something? Cheers. --Richhoncho (talk) 23:35, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

@Richhoncho: It seems to work for me. What specifically seems to be the problem? Jackmcbarn (talk) 02:01, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
Here's the message left on my talkpage. "Hi, Rich. I'm in the process of adding a few artists/songs to List of artists who have covered Bob Dylan songs and noticed that the sorting isn't working properly. Sometimes when I click the Artist header, it works fine. Other times, the order goes awry just after Bobby Darin, at which point sorting is by song title. I checked the hypertext, and everything seems okay, so there may be a bug in the programming. If you get a chance, could you take a look at this? Thanks." Same thing sometimes happens to me. Cheers. --Richhoncho (talk) 09:32, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
You screwed things up by using fancy quotes (“” and ‘’) instead of normal quotes (" and '), particularly as attempted quoting for the HTML attributes, so some of the sort values were coming out as "data-sort-value" itself. I went ahead and replaced them all, and things seem to be working again. Anomie⚔ 11:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for that. --Richhoncho (talk) 14:56, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

My edits on Bloodline (Netflix TV Series) glitched?

So I was editing the article, before I was going to accept it as a draft, and I fixed a </ref> tag. Then, I accepted it. But the acceptance message for the article was sent to me! When I looked at the page history, it seems I deleted 30 lines of templates and replaced it with one submission template with my username on it. I'm very sure I would've noticed if I did that, and I'm fairly sure I didn't delete the templates and replace them. Anyone know what I just did? Diff of the edit. Grognard Chess (talk) Ping when replying 14:56, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Chess: The diff is actually [52]. See Help:Diff. Some subst code in the previous version had not been substituted due to the unclosed ref. The subst was activated when you closed the ref, so it looked like it was you who made the subst. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:07, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-45

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

Recent software changes

Problems

  • There was a bug in VisualEditor with Internet Explorer. It hid tools like the link editor when you opened them. The bug was fixed on Monday. [56]
  • Issues with the new search tool caused geo data code to show up on pages on Monday and Friday. The mobile "nearby" tool was also broken. The problem is now fixed. [57] [58] [59]
  • HHVM caused server issues on Thursday. They are now fixed.

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4, and on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).
  • Some wikis have icons at the top of a page to show if it is protected or featured. Icons show up using CSS. You can now use the <indicator> tag in these templates instead to add the icons. [60] [61]
  • VisualEditor now tells you if you're editing a re-used reference. This helps you avoid changing it if you just want to add a new one. [62]
  • The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [63] [64] [65] [66] [67]
  • After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [68] [69] [70]

Future changes

  • The new search tool will come to the last wikis in the coming weeks. This includes Wikipedia in French, Chinese, German and English. [71]

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

17:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

TemplateData: Extending use; removing redundancy

Please see my proposal for combining TemplateData and template parameter documentation; and including Wikidata equivalences. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:02, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Combining abbr and wikilink

Combining <abbr> and [[#SomeAnchor]] touches high-level accessability design. (For example: U.S.). Here I ask if it is a good idea to use it. (I suggest continuing talk there). -DePiep (talk) 14:42, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Pages showing as still loading

In Firefox today, all pages I visit show that they are still loading (spinning green circle in the top left corner), despite all the data having loaded. What's causing that? Thanks. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 13:44, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

My status bar says "Waiting for tools.wmflabs.org" It's annoying because popups won't load until the page finished loading completely. --I am k6ka Talk to me! See what I have done 13:45, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. Yes, the persondata java script tool doesn't load until the page has finished loading too. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 13:50, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
Still happening today. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 09:52, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
Right, found it. I added the JS for Reflinks into my account about 3 weeks ago. Clearing that out, fixes it. Looks like it's trying to connect to something external for reflinks to work properly, but fails. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:09, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Active users list

Here it contains all kind of users not starting from Albino. Similarly, Commons has a basic "Recent activity" link [72], on the bottom of "User contributions", which leads me to Mateus Chiquititas Rebelde instead of myself. (Removing "limit=1" brings us to the en.wiki case). I don't use "active users list" on en.wiki so often, but I'm sure it worked on Commons until recently. Can we get it fixed? Materialscientist (talk) 01:50, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Albino shows no edits at the English Wikipedia so it's expected that Albino is not at Special:ActiveUsers. commons:Special:Contributions/Materialscientist does show a lot of activity so I don't know why you are missing from commons:Special:ActiveUsers. [73] shows you are skipped in a list starting before and ending after you, so it isn't an off-by-one error and the limit=1 comment at commons:Commons:Administrators' noticeboard#Active users list is not relevant. It wouldn't help to change the limit at commons:MediaWiki:sp-contributions-footer. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:47, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Do you mean that in [74] the tag "Display users starting at" does not actually mean "starting at", but instead requires the prefix to be a valid username? Materialscientist (talk) 02:58, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
No, I mean Special:ActiveUsers says "This is a list of users who had some kind of activity within the last 30 days". User:Albino is a real user shown at Special:Listusers/Albino, but has no activity within the last 30 days. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:04, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
I see. My main concern is that the prefix filter doesn't work. Materialscientist (talk) 03:38, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
There is no prefix filter. The special page runs a SQL query which (in essence) sets a counter to zero, jumps into the active users table at the start point (username=Albino) and works forward testing against selection criteria (hidebots=1&hidesysops=1) and for each matching row, increments the counter, formats and displays that row, until either the counter shows that sufficient rows (limit=250) have been output, or the end of the table is reached. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:50, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
@Materialscientist: I can see you on those lists at Commons unless, obviously, I set hidesysops=1.
@Redrose64: Are you sure? This returns "No users found", so I would think that a row that matches the activity criterion but also one of the hide filters would still increment the counter, such that the output can be shorter than the limit. — HHHIPPO 20:18, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Yess... this returns 1 user, it should return 2. It looks like the hidesysops=1 is processed after the counter is incremented. One for Bugzilla. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:24, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
The Commons results have changed since this discussion started. I don't know why but maybe it's related to Commons upgrading to 1.25wmf6 earlier today. The above links [75] and [76] show Materialscientist now but did not when they were posted. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:40, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: The original link included &hidesysops=1 - your most recent two do not, that is the difference. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:40, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
No, that's not it. The first link posted by Materialscientist is to Wikipedia and includes &hidesysops=1, but I copied the second link which is to Commons and never said &hidesysops=1.[77] The second link I copied is from my 02:47 post and never said &hidesysops=1 either.[78] The result of clicking those two links has definitely changed since 02:47 where they did not show Materialscientist. The first said "Mateus Chiquititas Rebelde" as reported in the original post. The second was a list without Materialscientist. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:12, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Signature

I have noticed that my signature in my Talk page appears with a #top –

[[User:P123ct1|P123ct1]] ([[User talk:P123ct1#top|talk]])

– but not elsewhere. Why is this? ~ P123ct1 (talk) 12:17, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, the default sig does seem to have changed subtly. My guess is so that the word talk doesn't get bolded. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:50, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
It was actually this edit but still in December 2007 by Mr.Z-man. P123ct1, the mentioned bolding is the feature at Help:Self link. If you copy your signature from here to your user talk page then it will display as P123ct1 (talk). #top is an anchor automatically inserted on all pages near the top. A customized signature with enough spare room in the 255 allowed characters can get this feature by adding {{SUBST:#ifeq:{{SUBST:FULLPAGENAME}}|User talk:YOURUSERNAME|&#35;top}} (as rendered here with YOURUSERNAME replaced) at the end of the user talk link, for example [[User talk:PrimeHunter{{#ifeq:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|User talk:PrimeHunter|&#35;top}}|talk]]. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:09, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Why would I want bolding, and why does the signature appear with #top only on my Talk page and not elsewhere? All pages near the top of what? Is Help:Self link a joke? I don't speak Rune! ~ P123ct1 (talk) 14:25, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
It only appears on your talk page because that is the only page where [[User talk:P123ct1|talk]] would not display as a link but as boldface instead. By including a section anchor, the bolding is suppressed and it appears as a normal wikilink. top is one of a small number of predefined anchors that occur on every single Wikipedia page, regardless of skin, namespace or page content. Physically and visually, it's just before the main heading for the page. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:26, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Yes, the html source of User talk:P123ct1 contains <a id="top"></a> before the heading "User talk:P123ct1". This code is automaticaly added by the MediaWiki software regardless of the wikisource of the page. It means you can link directly to that place. Compare User talk:P123ct1 and User talk:P123ct1#top. Your browser will probably scroll down a little to the page heading when you click the second link. There are similar id's mw-page-base, mw-head-base, content even earlier on the page but they are longer, less intuitive and possibly less stable. User talk:Redrose64#Protection advice shows what happens without #top in the signature: You get bold unlinked talk. This is a deliberate feature of MediaWiki so it's easy to spot attempts at normal wikilinking to the page you are already on. Another example for this page: [[Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)]] produces Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) here. In articles it especially happens in navboxes, for example those at the bottom of Stephanie Beacham. They say Stephanie Beacham where the same template on other pages would have displayed the link Stephanie Beacham. I think it's a nice feature in navigation, especially when the link is piped and doesn't simply display the page name. The navigation links "Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab Miscellaneous" at top of this Village pump are made with Template:Village pump page header, but the link code [[Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)|Technical]] displays as Technical here. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:28, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Less stable, indeed. mw-page-base and mw-head-base are used only in Vector skin; content is used in all except Modern. For that matter, top isn't used in either Cologne Blue or Modern, but these are less commonly used. I think that the only truly universal anchor is firstHeading which is right at the start of the main heading for the page. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:31, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
I didn't understand any of that, which doesn't matter, as all I want to know now is (a) why I should want to have bold and (b) what does it do? They are very simple questions, so may I have a simple answer? (not in Rune, please.) I am not computer-literate. ~ P123ct1 (talk) 13:57, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
(a) You shouldn't want to have bold in signatures. The whole reason for #top is to avoid bold. (b) #top avoids bold. That's the simple answers. We have explained the technical details very carefully. If technical explanations are Rune to you then you must live with the simple answers, and probably shouldn't ask for technical answers (as you must expect at the technical village pump), or try to update technical documentation. I have reverted your edits to Help:Link#What is an "anchor"? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:00, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

My edits to a specific page?

Is there a way to find all the edits I've made to a specific page? -- RoySmith (talk) 15:06, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

@RoySmith: Yes. Go to the history tab of the page in question, and look down an inch or two for the line of "External tools". The tool you are looking for is "Edits by user". -- John of Reading (talk) 15:12, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
You can also use commons:MediaWiki:Gadget-rightsfilter.js to filter any list in any page. Helder 23:04, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Rangeblock calculator down

The rangeblock calculator seems to have been down for a while. Does anyone know who to ask about it, and does anyone know of any other tools on the web that will let me input a list of IPs and will output a range that catches them all? Thanks, HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 20:11, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

I have used this tool (not WMF related). --Stryn (talk) 21:01, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Thank you, Stryn! That works nicely, and with only slightly more effort than the Labs tool. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 22:03, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Simple Move

I'd like to move the Simple English article on Islamic State to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as per main English article. Please advise. Gregkaye ✍♪ 22:29, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia is totally independent of the Simple English Wikipedia. You should ask there instead of here. Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:33, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
It's the same as English Wikipedia. At the top of simple:Islamic State there is a "Move" link in the "More" tab (Vector skin) or a "move" tab (MonoBook skin); use that. The page simple:Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant already exists, but it was created by making the opposite move, so you should be able to move over that. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:37, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
Redrose64 for some reason all I see are the tabs: Read, Change, Change source and View history which are followed by the star icon for placing pages onto watchlist. There's nothing more. When I went into View history, I found the edit] in which the page was moved to Islamic State and tried to undo the change through two routes, from the view history listing and from the Difference between revisions page. Either way I get a "The change appears to have already been undone." text in red placed just above the editing area and when I hit the save page button I am returned to the main article page with existing title and without the change being undone. Its baffling.
In simple, the link simple:WP:PUMP works as a redirect to simple:Wikipedia:Simple talk. Is this an appropriate place to pursue this or are there other specific options? Gregkaye ✍♪ 05:30, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
@Gregkaye: Page moves cannot be undone using an "undo" link - that's for undoing normal page edits. Confusingly, page moves (as well as some other actions like page protection) show up in the page history as if they were normal edits (example); but notice the absence of a diff at the top - it says "(No difference)" instead, because no text is changed when a page is moved. The message "The change appears to have already been undone" appears if the result of an attempted undo would not change the current text on the page.
simple:Help:Moving a page says that you need to be an autoconfirmed user in order to make a page move; I notice that you have only four edits, so you're not yet autoconfirmed. When you are autoconfirmed, the "More" menu, in which the "Move" link appears, should appear between the watchlist star and the search box. Moving the page should certainly be discussed, because there have been two previous moves, so another could well be controversial (this is why I'm not going to move it myself, even though I am autoconfirmed at simple:). You could propose the move at the article's talk page; I don't see a problem in also informing simple:WP:PUMP of the discussion on the article's talk page. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:48, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
Brilliant Redrose64 TYVM Gregkaye ✍♪ 10:17, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Reflinks error

When I try to access Reflinks, I get "Internal error: The URI you have requested, /fengtools/reflinks/, appears to be non-functional at this time." --Jax 0677 (talk) 23:35, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Revision history statistics

hi , the "revision history statistics " link is down,its at "External tools" in page histories at the English Wikipedia for users with en or en-gb as language. It's made by MediaWiki:Histlegend and goes to [79]. thank you--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 00:29, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

In mid October the tool timed out and was annoying to wait for without knowing whether it worked, so I added a down message to MediaWiki:Histlegend.[80] Should we add down messages to external tools in MediaWiki messages if we don't know how long they will be down, and clicking them immediately reveals that they are down now? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:55, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
The communication regarding technical problems with these statistics counters (X Tools) and WMFLabs DBs is poor and needs to be significantly improved. Not only are these tools down a lot lately or else very slow but I also found recent examples of incorrect data being displayed (data corruption?). Editors who want to report these issues or find out more about them are left in the dark and there is no easily available location to find information and get answers and status updates (see also my unanswered post above titled 'Edit Counters missing data'). I appreciate the significant effort put into these tools by all the creators but it should be possible to better inform editors when these tools are experiencing technical problems.--Wolbo (talk) 01:30, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Xtools are still intermittent

The Xtools are still intermittent. Ordinarily, one line at the top of each page contains useful statistics. They disappeared last night, for me, again. Should I file a bug report? --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 16:09, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

And now 03:50, 6 November 2014 (UTC), they are back; after accessing 'full page statistics', I just noticed
"Notice: Again issues with Tool Labs databases after db maintenance. Some wiki's won't work. Sorry about that!"
I guess we just live with it, eh? It's a benign issue, really. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 03:50, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
The Foundation has its priorities in where its allocating resources -- such as unwanted tools familiar to us all. Keeping tools most users use up & running is not a priority to the Foundation. But remember: keep those donations coming in, people! -- llywrch (talk) 17:04, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Error

  Resolved

There is a major error in mobile version Wikipedia (en.m.wikipedia.org). Two icons, one that link to Special:Notifications and the other that links to Mobile menu has suddenly vanished. Look at this, both the icons are missing but other icons like this and this are appearing without any trouble. I have tried three different phones Samsung Galaxy S4, LG smart phone and one other; I have tried 4 browsers, UC Browser, Opera Mini and two default browers but the problem persists. I have even tried two different connections, 2G and 3G. But it appears that the problem is in Wikipedia not in my device. I have just now logged in to commons and hasn't found this problem there. Please fix this issues as soon as possible. Mobile users having trouble without those links. Thanks, Jim Carter 13:58, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

I just went to the page [81] on my Galaxy S2, Android 4.2.2, and both the stock Android browser and Firefox 36.0a1 show the two icons that are missing for you. Do you still have the problem? If so, could it be due to the free Wikipedia from Aircel that you are using? Maybe they're filtering out certain images. Try a Wifi connection to check. AxelBoldt (talk) 16:52, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Hey, now working properly. I don't know who fixed it. But, thanks! And thank you too. Jim Carter 18:13, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014

 
 
Did you know?

VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Login and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings in the upper-right corner, to pick which editor to use. Choose "Edit" to use VisualEditor, or "Edit source" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available in Mobile Web.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements

The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias next week, and eventually at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus are now shown in the menus. VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience / Design group. The appearance of dialogs has already changed in one Mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.)

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search program could not find the page. A link inside a template, to a local page that does not exist, will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to a error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like [82] with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData

The tool for quickly editing TemplateData will be deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November.  This tool is already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation.  When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top.  Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common response for that parameter. The autovalue can be easily overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead

Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in tables will appear next Wednesday. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be possible later. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus will be hidden behind a "More" item, such as "underlining" in the styling menu. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide will be updated soon to add information about editing tables. The translations for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.

You can influence VisualEditor's design. Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:40, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

It would be nice if, a decade or so after Wikipedia (formerly WikipediA) abandoned camel case, the WMF would stop imposing it upon us. TemplateData, VisualEditor and TimedText are three examples. We are trying to be user friendly, and obscure capitalization is not that. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:10, 6 November 2014 (UTC).

Looking for small tasks and mentors for Google Code-In - Got something in mind?

Hi everybody! Google Code-In (GCI) will soon take place again - a six week long contest for 13-17 year old students to contribute to free software projects. Wikimedia took part in 2013 already with great results. Tasks should take an experienced contributed about two-three hours (but "beginner tasks" are also welcome which are smaller) and can be of the categories Code, Documentation/Training, Outreach/Research, Quality Assurance, and User Interface/Design.

Do you have an idea for a task and could you imagine mentoring that task?

For example, do you have something on mind that needs documentation, research, some gadget issues, or any templates to port to Lua on your "To do" list but you never had the time? If yes, please go to mw:Google Code-in 2014, check out the "Mentor's corner", and add your task there (please add tasks until Sunday even if it's only a stub - we can still polish them until December 1st when the contest begins)! And if something is unclear, please ask on the talk page. Happy to help! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Causing a within page link to appear as non bold re: template:History of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

An issue has been raised at Talk:Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant#History_of_the_Islamic_State_and_the Levant_infobox related to the function of template:History of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant when it is placed in the main article History of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

The reason is complications related to the last two items. In response to widespread political, Islamic and other rejection of the name "Islamic State", Wikipedia has kept with the use of the longer title: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant but we still use reference to the self-declared "Islamic State" in the history section.

At present the links in the template display as follows:

Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad  (1999–2004)

Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn  (2004–06)

Mujahideen Shura Council  (2006)

Islamic State of Iraq  (2006–13)

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant  (2013–14)

Self-described as:  Islamic State  (2014–present)

With the second line currently presented as:

[[Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant|Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant]]  <small>(2013–14)</small>

I appreciate the futility of the piping used which was in an attempt to remove the bold effect.

Help/advice would be appreciated. Gregkaye ✍♪ 09:30, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Gregkaye: There are at least two techniques, both of my suggestions involve a piped link. One is to link to a redirect; the other is to link to an anchor near or at the very top of the page - that is, add the fragment #content thus [[Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant#content|Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant]] - content being the value of the first id= attribute in the body section of any Wikipedia page, in both Vector and MonoBook. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:40, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
  - Redrose64 thank-you. 10:38, 3 November 2014 edited Gregkaye ✍♪ 10:43, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) @Gregkaye: I amended it. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:40, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
@Gregkaye: You don't need to do this, because id="top" is already defined in the page, as is id="content". The advantage of content is that it's further up than top. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:09, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks again Gregkaye ✍♪ 11:16, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
You could use something like this for all of the links so that whatever page the template lands on, the current page isn't in bold font:
{{#ifeq: {{PAGENAME}} | Village pump (technical) | Village pump (technical) | [[Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)]]}}
which gives:
Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)
—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:23, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
{{No selflink}} does this. It appears Gregkaye wants a link but not in bold. I don't know why. The bold text when navboxes are displayed on the linked page is standard and many readers expect it. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:23, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
PrimeHunter & Gregkaye I agree that this is the expected/desired behavior so I reverted it to a simple link. I've included the sidebar on several pages, including those listed as names, and the behavior (bold link on self page) is repeated. There's a discussion not to include it on the ISIL page anyway due to space and redundancy concerns.~Technophant (talk) 05:17, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
PrimeHunter Just to put you in the picture the suggestion for the change was made, I think sensibly, by P123ct1 with comment. 'Putting "Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" in bold is not necesssary and spoils the layout.' The two final links both direct to the main article page of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
As far as presentation of the template on the main article page is concerned a potential ideal could be for neither of these links to display. There have been long discussions related to article title usage and, if of interest, these are found at Talk:Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant#Moratorium_on_Requested_Moves. Gregkaye ✍♪ 07:31, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Easier searching for templates

When using the search box, could the search box be designed that if I type {{navbox}}, the search box software recognizes that I'm looking for Template:Navbox? I suspect that I'm not the only who copy-pastes an instance of a template in code to get to the page about it, so this would save me and other a lot of typing. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 23:47, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

It's a nice idea but it would require a change in MediaWiki as far as I can see. We can "almost" do something about it here at the English Wikipedia but it fails because '{' and '}' are at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)#Forbidden characters. That means a search on "{{navbox}}" [83] does not display MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new to registered users who can create mainspace pages. uselang=qqx does not show any MediaWiki message called with the search term, unlike for example [84]. If MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new had been displayed like on normal searches then we could have used $1 to check for searches of form {{...}} and test whether ... is the name of a template. We could not have redirected to the template but we could have linked to it at top of the search results. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:48, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
A Mediawiki change is what I had in mind and what I assumed it would be. It would be nice for every language to have this ability. Also, the templates appear on the dropdown menu so you don't have to hit the enter key and pick it from the results page. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 02:45, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
MediaWiki changes need to be filed at bugzilla:. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:07, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
@Oiyarbepsy: it's usually better to explain the problem or need, rather than ask for some specific proposed solution.
if i understand the need, it's something like this: "when editing an article using "edit source" (if you have VE installed) or "Edit" (if you don't), i find a template, and i wish to get directly to the template page".
if this indeed represents the need, then the answer is: when editing a page, a list of all templates transcluded in it (including indirect transclusion, i.e., templates used by other templates transcluded in the page) appear at the bottom of the page. use this to get directly to the desired template (unfortunately, i think this is missing when editing a section - i don't know why).
it might be a cute enhancement to allow searches starting with "{{" to pretend they begin with "Template:", and it's possible to create a script that will do that for you (to demonstrate, i whipped up User:קיפודנחש/CuteSearch.js), but i do not think it will be a good idea to make it the default behavior: the search tool should be optimized for the needs of the readers. for the editors, we have "advanced search" (click the magnifying glass icon in the search box), which allows you to determine which namespace/s will be searched.
peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 17:46, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
The advanced search misses the point. I'm talking about cases where I know exactly what the template is called because I just copypasted it from wikicode. This is about saving time when I know exactly where I'm going. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:52, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Also, I wasn't requesting a Mediawiki revision, I just assumed that would be required to make it happen. I sometimes assume wrong. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:53, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
@Oiyarbepsy: you might want to try the script i linked above. worst comes to worst, if it doesn't do what you want, uninstall it. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 06:29, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
@קיפודנחש: Works great, thank you. Maybe you should list it on WP:User scripts. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 03:13, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
@kipod: Would it be possible for a search box containing e.g. "{{foo" to not only show pages starting with "Template:Foo" in the dropdown list of results, but also lead to Template:Foo if Enter is pressed? SiBr4 (talk) 09:01, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
@Oiyarbepsy: - i doubt this little hack is worth it. there are hundreds of little snippers like this in userspace (quite a few of them in *my* userspace), and only a few are worth promoting to WP:US. personally i do not think this is one of them (if enough people feel it is, i'll add it there). i will add a comment at the top of the page informing myself that this may be used by others, so i won't wipe it out if i feel it ended its useful life. @SiBr4: - i'm pretty sure it's possible, but i do not think i'll invest the time to learn how it done and do it. anyone who wants to copy this to their own userspace and play with it is welcome (one might think of other similar "helpers" - e.g., if the search term begins with "[[", treat it as "no-redirect" to link to the redirect page instead of the target). peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 14:44, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

How does one make the "atschool" auto-appear and disappear on a schedule?

I am, like many, at school during weekdays. Whilst I can contribute to Wikipedia on occasion, I am nonetheless not readily available until mid-afternoon. Is there some way to set the "atschool" template to run on a schedule? Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 14:56, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

  • Those particular templates are intended for extended absences from Wikipedia (like when you'll be away for a week during finals and similar), and not for day to day on/offline type status. You could take advantage of parser functions and magic words to do what you want, in essence writing your own wrapper template. Such a template would follow the exact pattern and would never deviate from it. If you would like help with this, I'd be happy to give it a go (shouldn't be too hard for someone experienced in complex templates). I'll need to know your timezone and what schedule you want it to cycle through. Happy editing! — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:44, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks much for the response! I'm in Eastern Standard Time in North America, and I have school from 7:24 - 13:51 from Monday till Friday from September (or very late August) till May or till early to mid June (it really depends on the circumstances). The reason why I liked that "atschool" template was because it said that I "might possibly be able to edit on occasion", because that is true enough, though I wanted it to be clear that there was no guarantee that such would be the case on any given day. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 20:23, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

  • Being in EST, it can't be 100% automagical, as there is no way via template to deal with DST at the moment (the logic is in the parser function, but since Wikipedia uses UTC, we can't access it here on this wiki). So, at the start of the school year, you'll want to put the code on your user page (and maybe on your talk page edit notice). You'll also have to change the -5 hours to -4 hours when the change happens in the spring and the -4 hours to -5 hours when the change happens in the fall. The code for the winter months (EST months - eg now) will be {{#ifexpr:{{#time:N|-5 hours}} <=5|{{#ifexpr:{{#time:G|-5 hours}} > 7|{{#ifexpr:{{#time:G|-5 hours}} < 14|{{Atschool}}}}}}}} — This code will have the template only show up from 7AM - 2PM Monday-Friday. I don't think it is really a good idea to have it be any more specific than that (down to the minute), although if you really wanted to, you could do it based on what I've given you to start and the #time parser function documentation. Happy editing! — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 22:35, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
    Thanks much! I really appreciate it! Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 22:42, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
    @T13: There is a formula to calculate DST dates in the EU at Summer Time in Europe#Exact transition dates; I use a parser function-driven DST switch based on that formula on my userpage. I think a similar trick should be possible for North American DST rules too. SiBr4 (talk) 23:03, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
    This can probably be done with Template:Time, which says it takes daylight savings into account. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 00:19, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
    • With all my years here, I actually never came across that template before... Thanks for the heads up Mr. S. So, based on this new knowledge, the new chunk of code that you won't have to worry about making DST adjustments (although you still should comment it out during summer break) would be: {{#ifexpr:{{#time:N|{{Time/EST offset}}}} <=5|{{#ifexpr:{{#time:G|{{Time/EST offset}}}} > 7|{{#ifexpr:{{#time:G|{{Time/EST offset}}}} < 14|{{Atschool}}}}}}}} — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 00:53, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks much again, Technical 13, as well as everyone else! However... this is my last year until University, so I will probably have to make changes to it or use it for something entirely different in the years to come. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 01:04, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
  • @Technical 13: Would you be kind enough to add this functionality to the {{at school}} template? I'm sure Tharthan is not the only user interested in this option! SFB 18:15, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
    • Due to the multiplicity of combinations of days on or off and hours of various days, I think adding it to the template in this capacity would be way too much template bloat and would be a bad idea. Perhaps you could get Mr. S. to write a wrapper module in Lua that would allow you to set your timezone, set your days of the weeks and hours, and set which template you want transcluded during those times. Good luck! — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 18:45, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
      • Who or what is going to arrange for the page to be purged at the appropriate times? -- John of Reading (talk) 19:32, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
        • @Technical 13: I checked earlier this morning, around 7:10, and the template wasn't showing, even though it should've been according to the coding. It's showing up now, but it wasn't then. Do you have any idea why this may be? Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 14:18, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
          • @Tharthan: This is probably because the displayed time isn't the current time, but the last time that the page was rendered into HTML. It has to be this way so that MediaWiki can cache its pages. If MediaWiki didn't use caching, the server load caused by rendering each page from scratch for all of Wikipedia's millions of readers would bring the site down. You can work around this by purging, which forces the server to render the page again. Purging is done through a specially formatted link; you might find it easiest to use Template:Purge for this purpose. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:28, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
          • This is the main reason things like this generally aren't done on a day to day basis. While purging will update what you see, and everyone will see the right thing on their first load of the page, others won't know to purge the page to get an updated copy every time they visit. What you could do, if you are really adamant about this template, is create yourself a null edit bot that will purge your user page twice a day every day. You don't have to go through BAG for this since it is exempt as it is only making edits to your page (that aren't even really edits as they don't get logged in any way), but I'm certain there might be a few people that would frown upon this as it will add a little bit of server load to everyone for such a globally unimportant thing. Think about it. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:36, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Ghost edit?

I got a notification that AcidSnow "reverted" me on the article Somalia. I found that I had reverted AcidSnow's edit. However I have never edited Somalia, and neither have I enabled HHVM as shown in the diff. Yeah, I was reading the article around that time; but is it possible for an edit to be assigned to my contributions, when I was not the one who did that edit? Or am I suffering from memory loss? --Fauzan✆ talk✉ mail 18:30, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Wow that pretty weird if you ask me. AcidSnow (talk) 19:58, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
@Fauzan: Change your password ASAP. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:22, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Fauzan, there are several unexpected reverts in my edit history. I have traditionally put it down to clumsy mousework on my part, and nowadays I blame oversensitive tablets. I don't worry too much. Mr Stephen (talk) 21:16, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks everyone. --Fauzan✆ talk✉ mail 15:08, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Insert character

Who has stolen "insert character". One simply cannot work without it, and will have to flounce. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:13, 6 November 2014 (UTC).

What is your skin and browser? Try to clear your entire cache. Does it work when you are logged out? Do you mean a feature below or above the edit box? I have clickable character insert features in both places and both work. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:20, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Monobook, and Pale Moon, CometBird and Firefox. All work logged out. And the feature below the edit box that used to be below the save/preview/changes button. I don't want the space between my edit window and my buttons wasted. There is now a gadget CharInsert (more camel case) that is turned on automatically, but does not seem to help. What, one wonders, was wrong with the previous working system? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:01, 7 November 2014 (UTC).
Are you saying the wanted feature works when you are logged out but not logged in? Is it there when you are logged in and use vector like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Example&action=edit&useskin=vector? Do you have CharInsert enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets? It works for me but it is above the edit summary and not below Save page. It has a drop-down box where I can choose between Insert, Wiki markup, Symbols and some special charater sets. Are you referring to another feature than this? I haven't examined all the stuff in User:Rich Farmbrough/monobook.js. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:31, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
  1. Clearing cache makes no difference.
  2. There used, for many years, to be a built in character insert tool, as recently as 4th August this year. It was below the buttons (or was it?).
  3. The ambiguously dubbed "CharInsert" gadget (at the bottom of the edit window) is present logged out, but not logged in to this account.
  4. The gadget is enabled on preferences. I disabled it, and there was no difference. I re-enabled it and there was no difference. (I saved my preferences both times.)
  5. I assume CharInsert is intended to be a replacement for the original feature.
  6. CharInsert is not visible using the Vector skin, when logged in.
  7. My monobook.js stopped working some undetermined amount of time ago, probably due to a MediaWiki change breaking it.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 03:32, 7 November 2014 (UTC).
  1. Special:Gadgets is quite useful.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 03:36, 7 November 2014 (UTC).
It looks like MediaWiki:Edittools is the standard that I am used to, whereas MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert.js is the new gadget (which is on for everyone automatically). The nuts and bolts are at Gadget-charinsert-core.js and Gadget-charinsert-core.css MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert-core.js and MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert-core.css

     <gadget-charinsert-core> (View source | Export)
Uses: Gadget-charinsert-core.js, Gadget-charinsert-core.css

Requires the following right:

    <right-hidden>

So two thing to notice here, there is no such page as gadget-charinsert-core (the view source link is red), and there is apparently a need for some user-right that is hidden.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 03:49, 7 November 2014 (UTC).
It's MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert-core.js and MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert-core.css. Gadget code is always in the MediaWiki namespace and doesn't display the namespace at Special:Gadgets but there should be piped links like Gadget-charinsert-core.js. The CharInsert location changed in 2012. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 104#Charinsert not working. I have CharInsert when logged in, both in MonoBook and Vector, in Firefox on Windows Vista. Do you have "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing? Does it help to disable it? CharInsert works for me either way. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:15, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
  Yes I get that the pages are in MediaWiki namespace...
Enhanced toolbar doesn't help, though it does give me a work-around since it has its own insert character tool.
Thanks for all the help. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:52, 7 November 2014 (UTC).
You mention your monobook.js isn't working anymore... that is a clear indication you are running or importing some broken javascript, which probably causes your browser to stop executing it alltogehter, which means CharInsert is never run. However, you also indicate it doesn't work on Vector, which does not support my theory. In any case, you should try disabling all content in your monobook.js and re-enable all code step-by-step to find the culprit, clearing your cache every step of the way. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:55, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Yes I guess that is the next step, reluctant though I am to do anything with my js. Or I can use the advanced toolbar.
It might (for other reasons) be worth looking at the why Special:Gadgets points to MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert-core instead of MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert.
It would be nice to solve the mystery of <right hidden> too.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:52, 7 November 2014 (UTC).
There are three gadgets that have the ResourceLoader |rights=hidden parameter; they are marked as hidden because they're not available for normal enable/disable, but are linked to another gadget, which itself can be enabled and disabled in the normal way. These other gadgets are '(D) Geonotice: display notices on your watchlist about events in your region', '(D) CharInsert: add a toolbar under the edit window for quickly inserting wiki markup and special characters (troubles?)' and '(D) refToolbar: add a "cite" button to the editing toolbar for quick addition of commonly used citation templates'. If you are having trouble with any of these gadgets, it might be that one half thinks it's enabled when the other half thinks it's disabled. My suggestion is to disable it and save, then enable it and save. This should get the database to sort its internal pointers out. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:53, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Richard Gonda

Please add Richard Gonda to Gonda (disambiguation). Thanks. 213.151.215.195 (talk) 23:13, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Added. Materialscientist (talk) 23:16, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Wow !!! That was a 1000% addition.
  Done 213.151.215.195 (talk) 22:39, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Help with Stacked Infoboxes on Imran Khan

On the Imran Khan article, consensus has been reached that his sports stats and his political info should all appear as one infobox. There are two separate infoboxes which deal with this: Template:Infobox officeholder and Template:Infobox cricketer. The only way I could figure out to merge the two infoboxes was to include Template:Infobox cricketer as a module of Template:Infobox officeholder as is the case in the article right now. Is that the only way that this can be done or is there way to stack them one below the other? Thanks in advance. Myopia123 (talk) 21:53, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@Myopia123: I've made some tweaks to Template:Infobox cricketer and to the infobox code in the article so that infobox cricketer displays as a child infobox inside infobox officeholder. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 00:57, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Technical input requested about coordinates

Could the coordinate templates convert DMS coordinates to decimal? Please comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#This is why we have templates. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 23:48, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Short pages and Draft article space

Something changed overnight, and I'm wondering who to go to in order to find out if it was intentional, accidental, permanent, etc. I do Short Pages patrolling regularly. Overnight something changed, and suddenly pages in the Draft article-space are appearing on the list. They were not there as of yesterday. This change greatly reduces the useability of the short pages list. Draft article-space pages are not subject to a lot of normal article restrictions that would let me clean them out of the list, and I would rather not start sticking the normal "Long Comment" on them that gets placed on legitimate short pages to force them down the list. So I'm wondering what should be my next step in either requesting the change be rolled-back, seeing if it's a bug somewhere, or finding out that it's a change that will have to be lived with. - TexasAndroid (talk) 14:23, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

@TexasAndroid: My first thought is that this was probably caused by something in Wednesday's rollout of mw:MediaWiki 1.25/wmf6, but I don't see anything obviously related in the list of patches. I don't see anything obvious in any other recent deployments either. I also checked the recent MediaWiki-namespace changes on this wiki and found nothing, although a MediaWiki change sounds like the most likely explanation to me. In the absence of an obvious cause, probably the best next step would be to file a bug at Bugzilla so that the devs can take a look at it. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:41, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
[85] bug added. - TexasAndroid (talk) 14:37, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
The inclusion of drafts in ContentNamespaces sounds like a very bad change to me. I have started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Drafts#Draft namespace added to ContentNamespaces. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:40, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Test?

Would some of you mind trying this, please?:

  • Log out. Refresh your browser so you're in the default skin and preferences that 99% of our readers use. Hover your mouse pointer on the second footnote marker.[2]
  • Log in. Hover your mouse pointer on (or under, depending on your preferences settings) the second footnote marker.[2]

In Firefox and IE on Windows 8 you will see a tooltip displaying the text supported by that source. Does it work on other operating systems and browsers?

The British Polio Fellowship, then called The Infantile Paralysis Fellowship, was founded on the 29th January 1939 by Patricia Carey, who had contracted polio aged eight, and Frederic Morena, who had contracted the disease at the age of 42, as a self-help and mutual aid society for those affected by polio. They called a meeting in January 1938 at Bloomsbury, London which was attended by 30 people and which acted as the foundation of the organisation being formed the following year.[1][2] 

  1. ^ North, Barry "Something To Lean On". The British Polio Fellowship, 1999, p.1-3
  2. ^ Tony Gould (11 September 1997). A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors. Yale University Press. p. 165. ISBN 978-0-300-07276-1.

Anthonyhcole (talk • contribs) 20:59, 6 November 2014‎ (UTC)

So where is this 'magic' generated? I think it is a bad idea to mix abbreviations with links. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:10, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
I don't know what either of those sentences means. Sorry. The template was devised by User talk:Makyen at my behest - about 6 months ago I think it was. It's for those sentences and paragraphs that have content from two or more sources scattered randomly throughout them. Rather than repeat the footnote markers a dozen times throughout a short piece of text, you can just cluster them together at the end. In practice, people don't pepper such paragraphs with relevant footnote markers so it's clear what is supported by what because it looks so crap - they just leave them in a cluster at the end and leave it up to the reader and later editors to guess what supports what.
So, have you tried it on other browsers/OSs? Did it work? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 21:17, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Works for Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.17. Mr Stephen (talk) 21:36, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Thank you, Mr Stephen. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 22:18, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
I don't know the point of logging out and in. It's there whether you are logged in or out. It works in all five browsers I tested. In this example it is made with {{Ref supports2}} which uses the feature described at ABBR tag, Wikipedia:Manual of Style#HTML elements, {{abbr}}. It's a html feature and not a Wikipedia or MediaWiki feature, although it relies on MediaWiki permitting the abbr tag and passing it on to the rendered page. Hover here to see an example made directly with the abbr tag. Using it for other things than abbreviations is apparently controversial. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:54, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
I don't know which of my settings does it - or maybe it's my skin, Monobook - but when I'm logged in the abbr tag only pops up if I hover the mouse under the footnote marker. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 22:04, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
"Navigation popups" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and "Hovercards" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures can interfere by also trying to display something when you hover over a link. Below the footnote marker there is no link. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:13, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
I've got both of those enabled, so that'll be it. Thanks, PrimeHunter. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 22:20, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
@Anthonyhcole: This is very closely related to Template talk:Abbr#OK to combine abbr and wikilink?. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:42, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, Redrose64. I've got hovercards and navigation popups enabled, and they're reasonably compatible. I'm mainly interested in informing the 99.99% of our readers that don't have either of those features enabled, though. If either hovercards or popups becomes a default feature, and this Ref supports2 thing impairs their function, I'll just take it off the pages I'm using it on. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 23:50, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Per test, logged out, login again, footnote 2 underline displays "Supports ...". It appears to work as you described under Firefox 33, Ubuntu 14.04, with no mw:beta:hovercards enabled, with navigation popups enabled, and with reference tooltips enabled. As a side note, User:hedonil's XTools .js is displaying right now; sometimes those XTools are not displaying, but they are working at the same time your test displayed the text after hovering under footnote 2. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 00:44, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Thank you, Ancheta Wis. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 01:39, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
I believe that Hovercards is likely to be enabled by default at some point (weeks? months? I don't follow that product, so I don't know). User:Quiddity (WMF) might know more than I do. (I wonder if Hovercards could be adapted to play well with this?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:41, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
(Defaulting to laziness:) If there is incompatibility between this feature and Hovercards when Hovercards are enabled by default, I'll raise it with Quiddity. Thanks What. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 19:42, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, Hovercard never tries to make tooltips on footnote markers so it doesn't conflict with the way abbr is used in {{Ref supports2}}. It conflicts if {{abbr}} is used with a wikilink like here: Text with link. You can still see the abbr tooltip on the unlinked part but it gets hard if the whole part is linked like here: link. If I approach the mouse carefully from below in Firefox then I can see the abbr tooltip on a millimetre with a dotted line below the link, before Hovercard takes over. In my Firefox tests, Popups and Hovercard always "win" over abbr when there is a conflict. {{Ref supports2}} is currently only used in one article. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:31, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

CirrusSearch

We're in the home stretch for CirrusSearch. If you haven't been following along, this is the new search engine we're deploying to all wikis. We'll be deploying to dewiki and zhwiki next week leaving only enwiki to deploy to as the primary search backend. For this, we're planning to do the deployment on Wednesday, November 19th. I want to thank the over 20,000 beta testers here on enwiki who's been helping us test-drive the new setup. Your feedback has been (and remains to be) valuable for us getting this right. As always, please reach out to us on IRC (^d and manybubbles), Bugzilla (CirrusSearch component) or on mw:Help talk:CirrusSearch if you have any questions, problems or other feedback. Thanks! ^demon[omg plz] 19:10, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps someone should update the timeline at mw:Search for those who are watching that page but not the Village Pump. Chris the speller yack 05:31, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
  Done. Thanks for catching that, I always forget to keep that chart up to date. ^demon[omg plz] 15:53, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Template titled "under discussion"

For the template {{under discussion}}, if you link to a separate talkpage and provide a section header, the link on the word discussion goes to the talk page, but doesn't jump to the section. See the top of Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct for an example. At the same time, I recognize that I might have screwed up the template call, so either way, I could use some assistance. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 20:08, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

There are two parameters, |talkpage= - which is for the page name alone - and |talk= - which is for the section name or anchor. They can't both be passed through the same parameter because of the way that it's encoded - the rules are different for URLs and fragments. I fixed it. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:44, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
The documentation falsely claimed |talkpage= could include a section heading. Oiyarbepsy corrected the documentation after the above reply but I have now modified the template [86] to allow what the documentation said before, and modified the documentation to match this. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:14, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

EasyTimeline: ISO 8601 support

There is a patch to support ISO 8601 in timelines, in case anyone wants this feature. 84.127.115.190 (talk) 23:57, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi! Thanks for your patch! Please use mw:Developer access to submit this as a Git branch directly into Gerrit. Putting your branch in Git instead of a wikipage makes it easier to review it quickly. If you don't want to set up Git/Gerrit, you can also use the Gerrit Patch Uploader. Thanks again! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:29, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
How can an anonymous editor use any of those tools? 84.127.115.190 (talk) 00:42, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

What interface page is used for the results after a successful undeletion?

I want to modify the resulting page I get afte a successful undeletion of a page. Unfortunately, I can't find the right MediaWiki: page to use - it's definityly not MediaWiki:Undeletedtext. Can some one please help me here? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:12, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Beats me... The source text should look something like this (but search in MediaWiki: space turned up nothing):
<strong>$1 has been restored</strong>

Consult the [[Special:Log/delete|deletion log]] for a record of recent deletions and restorations.
-- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:29, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
It's the default MediaWiki:Undeletedpage. Searches in the MediaWiki namespace only find pages created at the English Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:57, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
I once downloaded Special:AllMessages 5000 at a time and stored them on my computer. That's how I easily found this one. If you guess it may have prefix "undelete" then it can quickly be found at Special:AllMessages. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:05, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
If you don't know the message prefix you can also search for the text on translatewiki.net. (Note that this only works for the default MediaWiki messages, not ones that have been customised for this wiki.) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:18, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
You can also append the code &uselang=qqx to URLs of the form /w/index.php?... to make MediaWiki display the message names instead of the contents of the messages. However, because you have to request the page again to do this, it isn't very useful for one-time operations like undeletion. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:37, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
and fwiw....
  • MediaWiki:Category-empty will give you the current message - be it modified or the default - in use "site-wide". Nothing new about that; but
  • MediaWiki:Category-empty/qqx will always give you the default message (if there is one). /just-about-anything will work too.
... its a quick and easy way to retrieve the default message without having to drill down through the history or dealing with Special:AllMessages for comparison, etc. -- George Orwell III (talk) 13:55, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
Preferences → Gadgets → Advanced = Add a toolbox link to reload the current page with the system message names exposed. --  Gadget850 talk 13:59, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
Not effective when the page is the result of a POST action. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 14:03, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
In cases like that, I usually use Firebug to add the "uselang=qqx" parameter to the <form action="..."> URL before submitting. Anomie⚔ 18:30, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

How do I work image redirects?

On Commons I redirected [[:]] to a more accurate version, File:Virginia 209 (old).svg, but the old one is still displaying (see at right). --NE2 17:15, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Redirects on file pages only have effect if there is no actual file at the title. You'd have to delete the file on Commons to be able to redirect it. Anomie⚔ 18:32, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
Is there a bot at Commons that finds redirects with images uploaded? --NE2 22:49, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Caching issue

Just a heads up, I have pages which are refusing to update, even looking from a fresh session on another browser. I will work around this until it is resolved (or resolves itself), but if others have the same problem, it might be worth poking operations. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:57, 9 November 2014 (UTC).

Are you talking about pages which had just been edited, or about other pages which transclude them? If it's the second, it's probably just a caching issue - if absolutely necessary, try a null edit. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 18:54, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
  Resolved

Wikidata sidebar links

I've been trying to figure out how to get the Wikidata link displayed under "tools" in the sidebar to display the relevant Wikidata ID rather than just "Wikidata item". It feels like it should be a simple bit of js, but I have had absolutely no success in working out what it is. Anyone have an idea? Andrew Gray (talk) 20:12, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

There is a userscript you can import from Wikidata, at d:User:Yair rand/WikidataInfo.js. Add the following your common or skin-specific js:
mw.loader.load("//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Yair rand/WikidataInfo.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"); // Backlink: [[d:User:Yair rand/WikidataInfo.js]]
to add a link to Wikidata under the article title, along with the ID number, description, and aliases. - Evad37 [talk] 00:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
Excellent, thanks! Andrew Gray (talk) 20:50, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Download as PDF does not print infoboxes

Till fairly recently (date unknown), the "Download as PDF" and "Create a book" functions used to print the infoboxes. I noticed a while back that this did not work and assumed it was something to do with the page I was printing. I now find that the PDF-print of infoboxes seems to have been completely disabled. Does anyone know if this is a bug, or have I missed some Community discussion that decided to disable the feature on English Wikipedia? This may be a MediaWiki problem, but I don't know where best to start looking. Can someone point me in the right direction?--Boson (talk) 22:10, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

It's probably related to this. Basically, {{only in print}} stopped working recently due to software changes, which has lead to some infoboxes not rendering at all. --ais523 22:24, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
Yep. To be clear, it is the software changes that lead to infoboxes not rendering, not the fact that {{only in print}} stopped working. MediaWiki recently switched from using the legacy PediaPress PDF renderer to using OfflineContentGenerator. The old PDF renderer worked by using its own wikitext parser written in Python, and that was causing problems with maintainability. The new architecture uses Parsoid to render pages, which solves the maintainability problems, and a lot of bugs in the old renderer have been fixed along the way. But the fact that the backend for rendering PDFs from wikitext has completely changed means that there are inevitably differences in the way the rendered pages appear. Apparently tables do not look very good with the new code, and there are an awful lot of different kinds of tables on Wikimedia sites, so as a workaround the devs stopped some of them from displaying completely. After some digging, I have found the code responsible: it appears that HTML is removed from PDF output if it contains any of the classes "infobox", "navbox", "rellink", "dablink", "toplink", or "metadata". Apparently the WMF are looking for volunteers to work on this code, so if anyone who knows JavaScript wants to help to make infoboxes visible in print view again, please take a look at it. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:50, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

"Lost" featured article

Hello! I am working on assessment of articles for WikiProject Systems, and I notice that in the last few days, we have "lost" a featured article, dropping from 8 to 7. I've tried checking the quality log to no avail, and the assessment logs for the Wikipedia Release Version Tools have a known issue that rules that out. I've also been through the lower-ranked results for Mid-Class articles, in case the article had been demoted, but cannot see any recent entries matching this. Has anyone got any suggestions that might help me track down the article in question? — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 00:42, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

The fish: Wikipedia:Featured article review/Manila Metro Rail Transit System/archive1
How to fish: http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FCategory%3AFA-Class_Systems_articles (then view the cached version)
--NE2 01:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

{{Philippine Census}} or {{Historical populations}} or maybe even {{PAGR}}

There is a problem here - Eastern Visayas

Percentage growth shown is too high even for one year. Value should actually be (approximately, because census-month is taken into account)
(((1 + (cur - prev) / prev)) ^ (1 / (cur_year - prev_year)) - 1 ) * 100 = 1.69 and 1.28

Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Mon 10:40, wikitime= 02:40, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Appears to be correct, it's using percent change, not percent change per year: 18.2%. If you want PAGR, you need to set |percentages=pagr. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 02:59, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
Well I'll be ...! Why's it set like that? (NB omitting |percentages= defaults to |percentages=PAGR) Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Mon 11:27, wikitime= 03:27, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-46

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

Recent software changes

  • You may see a new tool on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [87] [88]
  • The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [89]

File information cleanup

Problems

  • Wikimedia Labs was broken for a few hours on Thursday. It was due to a hardware problem. [90]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf7) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11, and on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).
  • You can now use more editing tools for tables in VisualEditor. You can add rows and columns, merge cells, and edit table captions. [91] [92]
  • The style and insert menus in the toolbar of VisualEditor now show fewer tools. This helps you see the most common tasks. You can see all items by clicking "More". [93]
  • The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [94]

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

15:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Viewing changes instantly

I think Wikipedia should have the preview displayed automatically in Google Chrome and when ever the sources code in the edit box gets changed, the text in the preview should change by itself without you having to click 'Show preview'. I think it might also technically possible to do what I suggested in Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_111#Teahouse questions in Google Chrome but not in Internet Explorer. I think Wikipedia should even change in such a way that that when ever an edit occurs on a page that you're reading, the edit actually occurs right in front of your eyes in Google Chrome even if you don't refresh the page, just like you don't have to refresh to see an email you just got pop up in gmail. That way, more people will undo edits they saw pop up that weren't worth making. If that's not possible, then maybe Wikipedia could just do nothing and wait for a newer version of Google Chrome to get made that will make all changes in any web page you're viewing automatically show the change right in front of your eyes, just like I once gave Google feedback that Internet Explorer 12 should do, then all 3 changes I said here were probably technically possible except for the first will happen automatically when that version of Google Chrome starts existing even if nobody managing Wikipedia does anything to make that change. In fact not only would somebody viewing the teahouse see their post appear without reloading the page just like a facebook post when they post their own question but they would also see that happen when somebody else posts their question. Because asking a question at the teahouse opens a popup box, even if somebody else posts their question when they're in the middle of asking their question, it should still be possible for them to see the other person's question pop up behind their question box then click 'Ask my question' and still have it post the same way as a facebook post and not cause an edit conflict. I also think that once that version of Google Chrome starts existing, the having the preview show automatically won't happen automatically but the change of the preview automatically updating itself once you click 'Show preview' will happen automatically eliminating the need to click 'Show preview' a second time. Blackbombchu (talk) 02:10, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Having an article change out from under a reader is a terrible idea. Jackmcbarn (talk) 02:25, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
In that case, the ability to see any web page change instantly could be an option whose default is to be turned off that anyone can turn on in internet options. Blackbombchu (talk) 17:39, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
The purpose of an article changing right in front of people's eyes was so that more edits could be undone, not so that they will always be reading the current. The number of people who would benefit from the edit being undone when they read the article after the edit is undone is much greater than the number of people who would just happen to be reading it when it got edited. Blackbombchu (talk) 00:14, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Having an edit change the article while your editing (without the preview button) is one of the features of the visual editors, altho it does have some flaws. But Jack McBarn is right about readers, they should see a static page unless they hit the reload button. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 02:43, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Web pages that change frequently (not necessarily instantly) do exist (they do it by means of the <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="..." /> element); the ones that I've encountered are mainly those with live coverage of a sports match. Test cricket is an excellent example; the match lasts five days, but the page can update several times per over. But Wikipedia is not a news feed. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:16, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
Except for talk pages, which, while not a news feed, are a defacto discussion board. I presume that WP:Flow will live update. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:54, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
User:Quiddity (WMF) should be able to tell us whether that's planned. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:27, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
@Oiyarbepsy: Maybe Wikipedia should instead work in such a way that each registered user can turn on or off the ability to see edits popup right in front of their eyes when they're logged in. I never saw the visual editor in Wikipedia even when I was using Google Chrome so I don't know if it works the same way as the one in [Speedy deletion Wiki] but the one in Speedy deletion Wiki is very cumbersome to edit mathematical expressions using {{sfrac}} so it might be better to have the option of using the source editor and displaying an updating preview after you click 'Show preview' anyway. Blackbombchu (talk) 22:20, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
I see no problem with such a preference, but I suspect it might be technically challenging to auto-update as you type wikicode. It seems like it would require some sort of split screed with wikicode on one side and the resulting page on the left (otherwise you lose your code box when you scroll to the top). I'm not a techie, so I don't know if there is a technical challenge in doing this. As far as Visual Editor, it's not perfect, I use it for some edits and not others, and usually anything with templates I use wikicode. I don't work with math much, so I have no opinion on that. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 23:04, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
I think it is still possible for it to work on Google Chrome. Google Chrome can do all sorts of things that didn't used to be possible on other browsers. Blackbombchu (talk) 02:02, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
We shouldn't create browser-specific features. It's bad enough having browser-specific workarounds for the likes of IE. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:23, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia ads

I have deployed Wikipedia ads template on my userpage, But the size of this ad is small, I wish to reconfigure this ad so that it fits to my profile(increasing height & width). How can this be accomplished? ( !dea4u  05:37, 6 November 2014 (UTC))

This would need a change to Module:Wikipedia ads. Looking at the module code gives me an urge to rewrite the whole thing, and especially to change the format of Module:Wikipedia ads/list. It could be possible to add a hack to make the images resizable until someone gets around to rewriting it, but personally I would prefer a rewrite. If you want to have bigger ads straight away, you can add a random Wikipedia ad directly to your userpage by using [[File:Qxz-ad{{#invoke:random|number|235}}.gif|800px]]. This displays a random file from File:Qxz-ad1.gif to File:Qxz-ad235.gif, with a width of 800px. Some files using this pattern of filename do not exist, however, so when those files are randomly selected, the code won't work. And it won't detect new ads. But for the most part, that code should do what you want. Change the width to suit your setup. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 10:40, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
@!dea4u: Sorry, it looks like I completely misread the module code (and the template documentation). It's already possible to change the width of Wikipedia ads with the |width= parameter. There is more info in the template documentation. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 18:44, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
An update: I've just found out that I wasn't actually going crazy - Frietjes added the width parameter on 6 November, pretty soon after I made my first post in this section. I've since completely rewritten the module (and fixed a few bugs and instances of invalid HTML); hopefully now it will be easier to read and maintain, particularly for people who are adding new ads. The new version also supports the width parameter, so you can keep using it as before. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:45, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
@!dea4u: You're welcome. Also, Frietjes is a her, not a him. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 07:46, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Minimal display in mobile view

The page Cloud Atlas (novel) looks normal in desktop view, but in mobile view there's virtually nothing apart from the page title, a TOC which appears to be expanded, and the usual bits and pieces around the top, bottom and sides. An examination of the page source reveals that apart from the standard headers (Special:MobileMenu, etc.) and footers (Terms of Use, etc.), there is very little in the page - just the page title. What is causing such massive omission? --Redrose64 (talk) 15:20, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

For me the mobile page displays fine – everything is shown except the navbox (which is usual for mobile view). SiBr4 (talk) 15:30, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
Same for me. Caching issue? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:44, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
It was the first time that I'd been to the page in mobile view; I only went there because of this thread (I went there in desktop view a few months ago when the Booker noms were announced, and wanted to check out what else David Mitchell had written). --Redrose64 (talk) 15:56, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
Is this still happening for you? Do you have a different mobile device/OS/browser than SiBr4 and Edokter? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:28, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
It's now working; I don't have a mobile device, I was using a regular browser (Firefox 33) and clicking the "Mobile view" link at the bottom. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:00, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

EasyTimeline: Chinese glyphs support

It looks like the Chinese Wikipedia has trouble with its timeline font, bugzilla:20825, but I can use wqy-zenhei.ttc without problems. Whoever is working on the WMF server should check that the font is under the GDFONTPATH directory (or change GDFONTPATH). 84.127.115.190 (talk) 00:09, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Could you please directly add a comment to bugzilla:20825 how you are using that font and with which MediaWiki version and extension version? Thanks in advance! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:39, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
How can an IP editor comment in Bugzilla?
I am not using MediaWiki. I run the PHP file directly.[95] 84.127.115.190 (talk) 01:06, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Commenting in Bugzilla requires a completely separate registration process. It also publishes your e-mail address to the world. In a few weeks, Bugzilla's contents will be migrated to Phabricator:, at which point editors' normal login will work. But until then, everyone has to register separately, regardless of whether you normally edit logged-in or logged-out. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

SQL

I have something like such table in Access

NAME YEAR RANK
FFF 2014 1
BBB 2014 2
CCC 2014 3
FFF 2013 2
BBB 2013 1
CCC 2013 3
FFF 2012 3
BBB 2012 2
CCC 2012 1

Is it possible with SQL (I would like to stick to the Access) to get something like this:

NAME 2014 2013 2012
FFF 1 2 3
BBB 2 1 2
CCC 3 3 1

This is just an example. The real table could contain much more rows with different and with more years. --Aswan fan (talk) 11:02, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

@Aswan fan: This is the page for discussing technical issues that arise in Wikipedia. Your query is really a matter for WP:RD/C. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:37, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
Thank you! --Aswan fan (talk) 09:01, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Producing a list of parameters

Is there a function or something I may use to produce a list of the parameters appearing in some (lengthy) template code..? Apologies if I've overlooked or forgotten something nearby. Sardanaphalus (talk) 11:17, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

What problem are you trying to solve? We will be better able to help you if you give us more details about what you are trying to achieve. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:38, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
@Sardanaphalus: ping. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:40, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
I have sometimes wanted the same. I don't know about Sardanaphalus but my purpose is usually to look for undocumented parameters so I can use them in template calls or add them to documentation. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:50, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the prompt responses. Prime Hunter's scenario is the context: undocumented parameters within lengthy templates. Sardanaphalus (talk) 14:07, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
For wikitext templates, perhaps this could be done with Parsoid? I'm not at all sure of the details on that, though. For Lua modules, there's no way that I know of to do this automatically, and writing the code to do it would be very difficult as you need to be able to parse arbitrary Lua code. To do it manually, though, a simple text search for "args" will usually do the trick, as that is the standard name for a module's arguments table. A parameter named "foo" can look like args.foo or args["foo"]. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:59, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
There's a clever trick invented (IIRC) by David Gothberg and/or Amalthea that does something like that, in template code. Trouble is it's so clever I can never remember it. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:36, 9 November 2014 (UTC).
For regular (i.e. non-Lua) templates I look for triple opening braces. If there are a lot, I copy the template's wikisource to a text editor, and use regexps to insert a newline before each set of triple opening braces, before each pipe, and before each set of triple closing braces. Then I save the file, grep for the triple opening braces and send it through sort and uniq which gives me my param list. For Lua templates, it's worse than as described by Mr. Stradivarius because the args list might not be in the main module; you've got to search all the submodules too - if you can work out which they are. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:45, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
Yep, that's why I said "usually". :) Another problem is the ability to use a variable as an argument table key. For example, with the code args['data' .. i] you would have to work out what all the possible values of i are to find all the possible parameters that will be accepted. And there is also the ability to reassign the args table to a different variable, meaning that the same table might not be called "args" at all. To make a complete list of parameters, you have to understand the module code, or at least the parts of it that involve the arguments table. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 03:07, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

You might want to invoke TemplateDataGenerator once within template or template documentation page, looking at preview and compare displayed output with already known and documented parameters. Module:TemplateDataGenerator is locally available. You could also use a recent TemplateData Utility which produces the same list of detected parameters, but the module offers sorting and works also on doc page. Greetings --PerfektesChaos (talk) 19:58, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

@Sardanaphalus: look at "Template parameters wizard" in WP:JS. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:53, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Download as ZIM & Table of Contents

Few weeks ago, wikipedia had this feature of downloading an article as a ZIM file. But now it's not found anymore. I just don't get why that has been removed. It was a great feature, please bring it back. And also while downloading any atricle as PDF....the tables in that articles are all missing. Even if I keep 'include table of contents' !! These features of downloading articles were awesome few weeks ago. Now nothing seems to work properly!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sree has it (talk • contribs) 14:36, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

See #Download as PDF does not print infoboxes. ZIM might come back at some time. See Help talk:Books#ePub format vanished. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:54, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
Related bug report: bugzilla:71660. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:18, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Cuniform font problem

Our Gilgamesh article has what is supposed to be cuniform text in it - except that it doesn't seem to display. I'm not sure if this is a font problem (possibly browser-specific), whether the characters are corrupted, or whether Wikipedia simply can't display cuniform. Could someone familiar with font issues take a look? AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:19, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

It's not surprising that most fonts don't support cuneiform. The freely available Assyrian font here works for me; the Gilgamesh article renders properly after it is installed. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 17:26, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
Template:Script/Cuneiform might be helpful.—Wavelength (talk) 17:32, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
We should probably implement a template like {{contains Chinese text}} to indicate to readers that they can install a font supporting cuneiform. I'll draft a template at {{contains cuneiform text}}. Would someone please create or find an appropriate and representative image for such a template? {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 19:07, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
That seems like a good idea - displaying characters in a font that few readers will have support for and not providing an explanation isn't particularly helpful. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:14, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
How about  ? VanIsaacWScont 06:44, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
I set a lang/script tag on the template {{Script/Cuneiform}}. That might enable the webfonts download to kick in for those who don't have a compatible font installed locally. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:33, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
@TheDJ: is there any documentation about those tags and the effect they have on possible downloads of webfonts - including limitations and such? There was a question here some week back that might have benefitted from the same approach, and I'd like to know how it works. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:54, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
ULS docs. Interestingly, cuneiform is actually shown as an example there.. Actually, this was working before without the lang tag..... I wonder if the additional font added by a user recently disabled the autoloading... Or am I just seeing things and I didn't change a thing with my addition of the lang tag and was the original reporting user just using a browser that doesn't support webfonts or did he have ULS disabled  ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:12, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
{{cuneiform}} doesn't render any cueniform symbols for me in the examples, and I don't see any font downloads in my console. Am I not understanding what it's supposed to be doing, or is it broken? (or maybe both!) Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:37, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Just tried it, Akkadian.woff downloads: Akkadian.woff. Not sure what browser you are using. And what ULS settings... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:02, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Yes, it downloads for me, as well, and the cuneiform displays as well, in the example link, ULS docs. (Firefox 33) Vanisaac's svg above looks like cuneiform to me, also. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 14:42, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Oh dear, are you implying I should have read something before making bold statements? This is unacceptable! (I'll come back to this if I can reproduce after reading the manual). Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 14:09, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

MathJax not working

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T75273

As the title says; it shows nothing. Anyone know why? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 13:51, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

What have you tried so far? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:28, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Nothing... and it seems to be working again. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:14, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
It was reported on IRC a few hours ago. Problem was identified and a workaround was put in place. Basically the HHVM hosts are missing a required library for the Math extension. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:47, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Eigenvalues_and_eigenvectors

[96]

Just before ==REferences== lies too much space.174.3.125.23 (talk) 16:27, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

That looks like that because the second column of notes is one line longer than the first column. Jackmcbarn (talk) 16:40, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
+1, It seems to be all in order. I understand where you're coming from though. Because the section above it is two columns, which together form a block, and the block is spaced from the top of the text references (which is on the left side) to the bottom of the block (which is on the right side, because there is right column is lower than the left) the amount of white space seems too large. I'm not sure if that should be changed, and if so, how. Thanks for the report tho! Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 16:48, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
A little space is always there because of unequal column height. However, Chrome has a bug that does not take orphan list items into account when calculating the necessary column height, which may amplify the effect. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 17:37, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Barelinks

Is there any tool other than this which can fix barelinks semi automatically? Please help me. I need any similar tool (which is not broken) urgently. I'm planning to take a wikibreak shortly but there are unfinished works. It will be frustrating for me to fix 104 barelinks. So, please help!! Jim Carter 20:04, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

@Jim Cartar: That's the only tool I'm aware of that currently does such a thing. Why don't you want to use that one? Is there a problem with how it works? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 05:42, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
I moved the following post from my talk page. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:55, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
Hello Strad, it appears that this is working for you. So, I was wondering if you can fix this using that tool. For some technical reasons, it's not working for me. Since there is no other way, so I thought if you can help me. I'm going to go offline by 14 November. Before I go in a break, I want it to be complete. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much! Jim Carter 10:45, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
@Jim Cartar: I left the reflinks tool running for about 5 minutes, and it came up with this. A lot of your URLs are 404s, and some others couldn't be filled in by reflinks either, so you will have to fix those manually. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:55, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Old version of ITNC displayed

When I look at ITNC, often a version of the page is displayed that is clearly not the current version despite the fact that I had the URL for the current version entered in my browser. This is apparent because the version displayed is often missing at least one candidate. This has also happened to me on other similar pages, such as ANI, but I mostly notice it on ITNC because that is the one I visit most frequently. Jinkinson talk to me 03:42, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Does it help to bypass your cache or purge the page? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:24, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Course related userrights

The list of admin userrights at Special:Listgrouprights is getting clogged up by 17 course related userrights. This seems totally unneeded since there is already the course coordinator usergroup, which admins can assign to themselves if needed. In addition, having those two separate lists seems to create maintenance issues for the devs, considering that the userright ep-bulkdelorgs is assigned to admins, but not to course coordinators. It makes it unnecessarily hard to review admin userrights, which have accumulated very quickly in recent years. Would you agree that it makes sense to request a removal of those 17 ep userrights from sysop ? Cenarium (talk) 03:48, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

@Cenarium: It's not really a maintenance issue for the devs. In fact, the permissions are built in to the extension right now rather than being customized for enwiki, so removing them would actually make maintenance issues worse rather than better. I'm not sure what reviewing admin userrights means. Jackmcbarn (talk) 05:02, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
@Jackmcbarn: There's lots of talks about unbundling admin rights and users would like to know which userrights can be unbundled. So it would be appreciable to have a good idea of the meaning of each userright, and not have lots of extraneous userrights that are excessively specialized and of no use to the vast majority of admins. There are also misleading userrights such as proxyunbannable, which from what I understand has no effect, yet many users think that admins can edit through proxy, despite not having torunblocked, the page on IP block exemption is even wrong on that count. Cenarium (talk) 09:51, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
"proxyunbannable" appears to have to do with editing via IP addresses blanned via the wiki configuration, via DNS blacklists, and whether blocks on IPs in the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header are applied to the user. Anomie⚔ 14:02, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
But according to Mr.Z-man here, it's not in use, since we don't use mw:Extension:AutoProxyBlock but instead mw:Extension:TorBlock. So admins cannot edit through tor. There's also rate limits, I don't know if they are used for anything besides account creation on WMF wikis (noratelimit is given to account creators so they can create more than 6 per 24 hrs). I'll add this to Wikipedia:User_access_levels#Table when it's clarified.
I should note that there's precedent for unbundling specialized userrights from sysop, with the abusefilter extension which has a special group for editing filters. Couldn't this make sense for this extension too ? The concerns shouldn't be limited to en.wp. Cenarium (talk) 19:00, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
API query

"ratelimits": { "move": { "user": { "hits": 8, "seconds": 60 } }, "emailuser": { "user": { "hits": 20, "seconds": 86400 } }, "rollback": { "user": { "hits": 10, "seconds": 60 } }, "linkpurge": { "user": { "hits": 30, "seconds": 60 } }, "renderfile": { "user": { "hits": 700, "seconds": 30 } }, "renderfile-nonstandard": { "user": { "hits": 70, "seconds": 30 } }, "pagetriage-mark-action": { "user": { "hits": 1, "seconds": 3 } }, "pagetriage-tagging-action": { "user": { "hits": 1, "seconds": 10 } }, "thanks-notification": { "user": { "hits": 10, "seconds": 60 } } } }

So notably, there are no restrictions for edits, and 8 moves per minute max. IPs and newbies have max 8 edits per minute. Rollbackers can make up to 100 rollbacks per minute. Cenarium (talk) 00:11, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Module syntax highlighting broken for hidden comments

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T75281

Has someone broken the syntax highlighting on module pages (edit mode appears to be fine). For example see Module:String. Code is all gray text except a bit of red at the very bottom. At Module:Citation/CS1 highlighting starts out normally and then goes gray and then red at the very bottom.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:44, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Fwiw... there was an update to the related extension that was rolled in wmf7 - can't say if the cause lies there or not however there will be an update to the related extension coming in wmf8 released next week - doesn't seem to change anything except the version numbers however (see the beta wmf8 here).

The problem seems to be that text "hidden" using --[[ doesn't recognize the close of the hidden section anymore in "view" mode.

Maybe the close ]] now needs a space before the next true function call begins in order to differentiate "hidden" from "code"? -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:09, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Worse than that I think. In Module:Citation/CS1 the first opening (--[[) of a multiline comment is on line 38. The last ]] that occurs in the page is at line 2401 but is a quoted string so is not a multiline comment close. Looks to me like the highlighting is well and truly broken if it is treating ']]' as the close of a multiline comment. The red text is because the highlighter is treating the closing quote of that string (now outside of a 'comment') as the start of a quoted string.
I noticed the other day that the other version of Lua multiline comments (--[=[ ... ]=]) is ignored by the hightlighter.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:30, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
add existing Bugzilla 73281 for tracking purposes -- George Orwell III (talk) 02:13, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
As mentioned in the bug report, this is a bug in GeSHi, and needs to be reported/fixed on GitHub. The module view mode uses GeSHi for Lua syntax highlighting (via mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight GeSHi), but the edit mode (CodeEditor) uses different syntax highlighting code, which is why there are slightly different results. I seem to remember the highlighting on Module:String working before, so this looks like a regression. But again, that's probably best brought up on GitHub. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 07:03, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
As having written a Lua syntaxhighlighter myself, I can tell you that the options to construct strings and comments in Lua is a nightmare for any syntax highlighting software :). And yes, this should be reported on Github.   Done —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:54, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
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