Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 145

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Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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Data center migration test has been postponed until mid-April

Quick update:

• The main phase of the data center migration has been postponed until mid-April. This means that the two 30-minute-long read-only events will not happen this coming Tuesday and Thursday, but will instead happen during the week of 18 April.
• The back-end service migration (originally planned for tomorrow) will happen during the week of 04 April instead.
• There will be no code freeze this week. (Instead, there will be a code freeze during the week of 18 April.)

Please do not plan any watchlist notices about the read-only times just yet.  ;-)

More news later, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:08, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Would you kindly not use 'tomorrow' and the day-of-week such as Tuesday/Thursday. They make sense where the events may be happening in your time zone, but there are places that have time zones many hours removed from yours, and in those places the event times you stated are meaningless. It is possible for it to be Tuesday where you are, but Wednesday where I live (UTC+13, NZDT) and still Monday somewhere else. The ONLY correct way to state a time that is meaningful everywhere is the UTC format, such as 18:08, 16 March 2016 (UTC). Akld guy (talk) 21:39, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

I suspect WhatamIdoing wasn't too concerned about precision because the events in question have been called off, so it is not important to know when they were exactly scheduled to occur. — This, that and the other (talk) 22:48, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, Akld guy; it's good for everyone to be reminded on occasion.

As it happens, all times, dates, and days of the week for all of the messages about this event have been given in UTC (unless explicitly and redundantly translated to Eastern time for convenience of people who live thousands of miles away from me  :-), because that's the only "timezone" that Ops really cares about. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:26, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Some people may recall that times given by the WMF have occasionally been in PST (e.g. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 107#Brief read-only test on English Wikipedia in 25 minutes) and so it's best to be explicit. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:24, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Media Viewer

I was just wondering why the "Media Viewer" was turned off recently. I can't recall exactly when, but in the last week or so I think. I thought it was strange because it had been introduced without question in c. 2014, but now I see I have to activate it again via "Preferences". This isn't a big problem in itself, but why all the buggering around? It took me a good 10 to 15 minutes of searching to work out what it was called and where the preference itself was located. Jared Preston (talk) 20:26, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Maybe because we wanted it to be opt-in, not opt-out? --Redrose64 (talk) 21:22, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh good, I am glad it is not default. HighInBC 21:25, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, for me it had been on by default for nigh-on two years, which is why I wondered why it had been turned off and made opt-in again. Jared Preston (talk) 21:51, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Redrose64, HighInBC, it looks like a nope on that. I logged out, created a new account, and Media Viewer is still default on for new users. I'm guessing Jared Preston just had some odd glitch or something. It would have been major news if there had been a mass-change to opt-in. Alsee (talk) 08:33, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

That's strange then, but thanks for looking into it, Alsee! Jared Preston (talk) 10:18, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Yesterday I visited the Punjabi Wikipedia for the first time (I was looking up pa:ਕੌਰ (ਨਾਮ), if you're interested); within minutes a blue square and orange bar informed me that they sent me a message, so I looked at my prefs there to see when my account was registered - it was 17:37, 17 March 2016, that is, mere seconds before I got the orange strip. On receiving Alsee's notification of 08:33, 18 March 2016, I checked the other prefs, and found that at pa:ਖ਼ਾਸ:ਪਸੰਦਾਂ#mw-prefsection-rendering, "Enable Media Viewer" (curiously, written in English) was enabled, so I guess that's the default state. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:58, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

mw:Localisation statistics shows great variation in the number of translated system messages. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:23, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Undo & Redo buttons

Would it be possible to add undo/redo buttons to the editing toolbar? While I usually edit off-page in a word processor, on the occasions when I do small edits online, I've needed an undo button more than often! -- André Kritzinger (talk) 12:29, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I use Ctrl+Z for undo, Ctrl+Y for redo. Works in most Windows browsers, provided that you've not WP:PREVIEWed in the meantime. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:40, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I often can't be bothered to sit up enough to reach my keyboard - would a user script help? fredgandt 12:49, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

P.S. Of course (just checked), in that case, the right-click menu offers Undo and Redo options. fredgandt

I checked, and Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y works for me. So does the right-click menu. Thanks, Redrose64 and Fred_Gandt. That helps me, though, but how about the untold number of other dummy contributors like me who are still not aware of these options? Therefore, I'd still like to see those buttons in the toolbar. -- André Kritzinger (talk) 13:40, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

At first I thought to say "the key-combo and menu methods are commonly known and used, and blah blah blah...", but if we view the editing area as an embedded text editor, the idea of the inclusion isn't without merit. It's always worth bearing in mind that Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on the net, reaching multi-millions of users, from more cultures and backgrounds than I can list, and users of all ages and capabilities. Only a few weeks ago, a friend was visiting and reading Infant Jesus of Prague where he noticed a spelling error. I asked him to point it out so I could fix it, and was surprised to learn that he was surprised that I could (I then explained all about it). This highlights that although we take for granted the functionality of Wikipedia, other users are less savvy.

My mother wouldn't have a clue! She's literate, but not computer literate, and although could contribute, the bar for her is too high. Anything that lowers the bar should be seriously considered.

It's common for more technical text editors to include Undo and Redo buttons in their horizontal top menus;^{[Citation needed]} perhaps we should consider putting these in the default Vector configuration? fredgandt 14:44, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately, undo and redo in the web are actually surprisingly difficult to implement. You basically need to intercept everything that can possibly happen to the textarea and implement it all yourself. WikEd and VE both do this, but it's less than trivial to do and requires a lot of browser hacks. It would significantly complicate the editor. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it, just, is it worth it to invest there (compared to all the other stuff that needs work). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:56, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Noted - good point(s). fredgandt 15:57, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Seeking assistance with newly created template/infobox

Template:Infobox U.S. national banks is my first attempt at creating a template/infobox page, and I am having some difficulty. Roughly half of the fields are working (see here). Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.--Godot13 (talk) 12:53, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

As a general observation, you've made all the parameters mandatory, that is, code like

| above          = {{{bank name}}}

means that when you use the infobox, |bank name= must be provided. For the parameter to be optional, you need a pipe before the closing braces, as in

| above          = {{{bank name|}}}

Turning to specifics, your documentation indicates that a parameter |bank location= is valid, whereas in the template code, I don't see {{{bank location}}} or even {{{bank location|}}}. What I do see is a line

| subheader2	 = {{{bank location city, state}}}

which means that the template recognises |bank location city, state=. On a related matter, bank location city, state is a somewhat unusual name for a parameter - have a look at the code for {{Infobox company}} to see how parameters are commonly written - for example, no commas, and underscores not spaces. This one recognises such parameters as |hq_location= |location= |hq_location_city= |location_city= |hq_location_country= |location_country=. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:08, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Redrose64 for the feedback, I'll make the changes you suggested.--Godot13 (talk) 13:13, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

@Godot13: I took liberties with the template and it's documentation. fredgandt 16:00, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Article Wizard "new unreviewed article" template bug?

{{new unreviewed article}} is currently the subject of a TfD, and this is causing "‹ The template below (New unreviewed article) is being considered for deletion. See templates for discussion to help reach a consensus.›" to appear on all articles that use it - which is as expected, but that message seems to appear twice when added by the Article Wizard, and the second one remain after the {{new unreviewed article}} is automatically removed as a result of being speedied.

Is there a bug in the Article Wizard that's causing it to add {{new unreviewed article}}, note that this template is up for TfD, and then to add its own (second and redundant) copy of {{Template for discussion}}? (Is it possibly being wrong-footed by the fact that User:Ricky81682 put the {{Template for discussion}} at the bottom of {{New unreviewed article}}, when the wording as rendered - "the template below..." - suggests it should go above it?) --McGeddon (talk) 13:31, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

A message on my page would have sufficed. I moved the message to the top of the template. As to the Article Wizard bug, that's another matter and that could be discussed at that template's talk page. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 18:11, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

@Ricky81682 and McGeddon: it has come to my attention that this problem was not resolved with your actions on 15 March and up to 10 minutes ago it seems that articles were getting the TfD notice substituted on them (example: [1]). I've put noinclude tags on the notice now, so I hope it has stopped. But there are potentially a lot of these left - any chance you could get them fixed up? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:55, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't think that's causing it. It seems like Template:Userspace draft does a check and if a page is moved into mainspace, it puts up the unreview template by substitution I think which I think is unnecessary since there's also a backlog created at Category:Misplaced userspace drafts. Even then, the TFD notice is a small notice that says "The template below ... is being considered for deletion." I understand that new users could still be confused by that but at some point, I think it's better to have everyone who sees the unreview notice know that it's at TFD than to worry about some new user who could freak out that their page is for deletion, especially when we are talking about pages that haven't been reviewed and could be up for deletion anyways. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:04, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

You seem to be missing the main point which is that the TfD notice is being substituted onto articles. These will not disappear when the TfD is closed - they need cleanup - and there could be hundreds of them ... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:07, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Okay perhaps not hundreds. I've found 49 here: [2] — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:11, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

@Ricky81682:, can you please clean these up? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:40, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I've clean it up with my alt account but what was actually substituting the template and why? Can we fix that? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 19:58, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

That and I have no idea why people kept removing the template but not the notice like at Sony's Creation: The Legit Version which is just complete nonsense. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 20:43, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Was it just me?

I haven't been able to access Wikipedia for the last 3 days. I couldn't even read the /api page. There were apparently no return headers received. I could read and contribute to other WikiMedia sites, like WikiData, after logging back in. (Whatever happened logged me out.) Yesterday, I tried from somewhere else, and Wikipedia worked, but when I got home, it still didn't work for me. It just recently started working, though I had to log in, again. I am just wondering if anyone knows of any recent changes that could have made such a conflict, or if it was entirely on my end. —PC-XT+ 01:21, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Probably corrupt cookie data or something similar. There are a multitude of instructions for clearing cookies and local storage depending on device, operating system and browser choices and settings. To save typing lots that might not need typing, if you require more info, please ask. fredgandt 01:48, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I am having some kind of cookie trouble with OAuth, now, so I'll see if clearing cookies and local storage resolves my issues. —PC-XT+ 04:26, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Reference bracket wrapping

Something seems to have been changed in the "skin" (I think that's the term). The past few days I've been noticing odd wrapping of reference brackets, for example [1][2][
3]
instead of wrapping the last word and the brackets, like
this.[1][2][3]
or at least cutting off for wrapping at a more sensible/logical point, such as this.[1][2]
[3] - André Kritzinger (talk) 18:58, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Is this consistent for you (e.g., happens on every page, or always happens on a particular page)? Does it go away if you WP:PURGE the page? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:32, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

This has been a staple issue for years, and we have no solution for it. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:17, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Actually, this one looks like a new one. It's not that the whole ref (attached to punctuation) is wrapping, but that some of the ref is wrapping. I can not remember a report of that behavior. --Izno (talk) 11:22, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I think I have encountered it before. But I traced it to the brackets being enclosed in spans (added in 2008!), which seem to serve no ohter purpose then to be able to select them in CSS. I think I'll remove them, as they do interfere with the nowrap property. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:38, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

For future reference, see Special:Permalink/249710166#Turn off display of in-line cites by default. Helder 13:10, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

1. Any page, Whatamidoing, whenever a paragraph ends at a spot where wrapping to the next line becomes necessary.

2. Purging won't fix it, if not even editing does. (I'm in the middle of some major revisions of about 300+ articles.)

3. No, not for years, Edokter. It first popped up a few (2 or 3?) months ago, when the brackets all stayed together like

this.

[1][2][3]

but wrapped separately from the preceding fullstop. Then it went back to the way it was, wrapping together with the last word and fullstop, like

this.[1][2][3]

The silly stuff began a few days ago, with wrapping between bracket and bracket content, which give results like

[1][2

][3] or

[1][

2][3]. What I've never seen yet is

[1][2]

[3] which would still look silly, but at least logical. Come to think of it, this last example also happened 2-3 months ago. (Forgettery is a beach...) -- André Kritzinger (talk) 11:43, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

There are many factors that control wrapping. The Cite extension also has CSS (like unicode-bidi) that affects wrapping, and perhaps something was changed... I don't know. I do hope the situation is more stable now. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:05, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Looks like it's fixed. The last page I edited last night still loaded cripple but turned out correct after purging. Thank you! -- André Kritzinger (talk) 12:17, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for posting this. I've seen this happen on two pages in the past two days. Returning and purging resolved my concern. - Paul2520 (talk) 13:56, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, if purging fixed it, then I suspect it was the problem, where mobile rendered pages were ending up in desktop context. That might indeed explain a few things. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:59, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I do think me removing the span tags around the brackets did help; I tested it in my console, and the fault did appear to be caused by the spans. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 19:11, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Things like that shouldn't just change on a whim though. Something deeper must be occurring. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:05, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

There are sometimes changes in the extension's CSS, but the spans were the real culprit. It should not happen again. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:04, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Table artifact in Talk page post

Hi, there is a wikitable artifact in this Talk page post that I cannot find. Please help me figure it out. Looks like this: |} Ping me back. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 17:04, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

 Done. Checkingfax, the unneeded {{end}} caused it. --Pipetricker (talk) 17:19, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi Pipetricker. Thanks. That is really weird because I added the end template in an attempt to get rid of the artifact. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 17:42, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Direct URL to preview?

Google's not helping: Is there a URL format to jump directly to the preview rendering of any MW wiki page (no kludge-and-hackery); i.e. skip the need to click Show preview after visiting with &submit in order to show both the raw text editing area and the rendering? fredgandt 20:10, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, Preview section at the bottom, "Preview on first edit"? Is that what you're looking for? --Izno (talk) 20:22, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I wuv you :-)

Shame it needs to be a pref. Any way to do it by API or browser GET? fredgandt 20:31, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Worked it out, by API thanks :-) I can switch it on and off as needed. fredgandt 20:39, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there's a javascript lying around for live preview too. --Izno (talk) 21:26, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

It wouldn't surprise me. Nope, that option is spot on - when specifically wanting it on - it's a pain in the viewport the rest of the time!

The ability to switch the option on and off by JS is actually fine for my purposes, but a direct URL would be handy i.e. ...&action=preview which would have the same effect whatever the user prefs.

However - what I was typing got me thinking, and I found editintro which allows almost the right thing (except with section editing). See editintro=Wikipedia:Example & title=Wikipedia:Example & action=edit. fredgandt 23:12, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh dear - I should drink more tea. There's an option to preview - with a bug. So there's that! -_-  fredgandt 23:15, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

For the historians: action=edit & title=Wikipedia:Example & section=1 & preview=yes works exactly as expected. fredgandt 23:21, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Hot Cat

Hi, I can't seem to get hotcat to give any suggestions for categories, am using safari on ipad, please advise. Atlantic306 (talk) 01:02, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

WP:Checklinks is going bonkers

Why is WP:Checklinks adding 10 extra accessdate= parameters per reference in this edit? Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 11:49, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Dispenser. Can you answer over here, please? Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 00:23, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Frietjes. Can you fix it? Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 17:19, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Checkingfax, if I could see the source code, I could suggest a fix, but I can't fix something to which I have no access. Frietjes (talk) 14:30, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Daylight saving problem in auto-generated time display

New Zealand has been running on daylight saving time since September, but will put the clocks back in about three weeks at the end of summer. In the infobox at Time in New Zealand, the correct current time displays at page load (more correctly, it does after a purge), but 'NZST' is displayed because the call to get the time requires NZST for NZ's time. My complaint is that the 'NZST' is misleading, since NZ is on summer time, but there doesn't seem to be any way to make the infobox show NZDT or hide the NZST so that it doesn't mislead. Is there some way to, preferably, make it automatically show the correct descriptor from season to season, or alternatively hide it? Akld guy (talk) 14:21, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

There is a template {{Current daylight saving offset in New Zealand}} which returns 0 when NZST is in force, 1 when NZDT. It presently returns 0. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:41, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I don't know how to implement that. Tried inserting it a couple of ways but got error messages. Akld guy (talk) 15:15, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps like this?

{{#time: H:i|{{#ifeq:{{Current daylight saving offset in New Zealand}}|0|now+12 hours|now+13 hours}}}} {{#ifeq:{{Current daylight saving offset in New Zealand}}|0|NZST|NZDT}}

07:27 NZST

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:39, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it and the result was 04:52 NZDT which looks like it's on the right track but lacks the date. Akld guy (talk) 15:54, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

{{#time: H:i, F j, Y|{{#ifeq:{{Current daylight saving offset in New Zealand}}|0|now+12 hours|now+13 hours}}}} {{#ifeq:{{Current daylight saving offset in New Zealand}}|0|NZST|NZDT}}

07:27, April 25, 2024 NZST

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:59, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

That one worked well, Trappist! I've made it permanent and will keep an eye on it right through to when we set the clocks back to make sure it's ok. If its successful, the code could be implemented at many other countries' time articles. I've been burning the midnight oil and need to get back to sleep right now. Akld guy (talk) 16:08, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Ok. I thought about tweaking {{time}} but discovered that it is a series of 40-ish separate templates. I think I'll play around with consolidating that structure into a single module.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:15, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I eliminated one #ifeq: test. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:33, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I reverted your edit because it made the date wrong. It set 17 March instead of 18 March, and if you're in the UK the error might not have been obvious to you. New Zealand is normally 12 hours ahead of UTC and is 13 hours ahead during daylight saving, so it's already the 18th whereas it's still the 17th in the UK. Akld guy (talk) 19:09, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Strange - addition is associative, so

{{#time: H:i, j F Y|{{#ifeq:{{Current daylight saving offset in New Zealand}}|0|now+12 hours|now+13 hours}}}}

should be mathematically equivalent to

{{#time: H:i, j F Y|now+12+{{Current daylight saving offset in New Zealand}} hours}}

but the first emits 07:27, 25 April 2024 where the second emits 07:27, 24 April 2024. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:16, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Except for now, units need to be specified for each part of the sum:

{{#time: H:i, j F Y|now+12 hours+{{Current daylight saving offset in New Zealand}} hours}}

→ 07:27, 25 April 2024 - Evad37 [talk] 00:41, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

@Evad37: Thank you for simplifying the code. It is currently displaying the correct time/date. I'll be watching carefully to see what happens when NZ reverts to NZST on the first Sunday in April. Until it's confirmed that the code resets automatically, I would advise editors not to use it at other countries' time articles. Akld guy (talk) 02:36, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

• I'm not sure that the current time is a good piece of content for an encyclopaedia. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:47, 20 March 2016 (UTC).
  

Text apears smaller in wikitables

I noticed that text apears smaller in wikitables and I was wondering if there has been any recent changes in the wikitable. Jahn1234567890 (talk) 00:43, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Doesn't look any different to me; please give examples where you see a difference. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:57, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I frequently work on result tables and there has been some kind of change in those tables. After having another look at it, it looks like the table cells are wider than before. I have no screenshot of how it looked before but I'm pretty sure there has been a slight change of some sort. Jahn1234567890 (talk) 01:05, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

What pages are these "result tables" on? --Redrose64 (talk) 01:09, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Forgot to mention that I meant motorsport result tables but here is just one example of some of those result tables Example Jahn1234567890 (talk) 01:13, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Someone set the font size to 90% in that table. Look at the first line of the table to see how it was done. If you want the table text to be normal size, remove the whole "style" statement. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:36, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I removed the font sizing - 75% and 85%. The main table is large, but using tiny fonts makes it large and unreadable. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:58, 20 March 2016 (UTC).

Vertically stretched image

Resolved

thumb|Does this looked vertically stretched to you? Why, presuming this photo of Stephen Crabb is looking stetched to you, is this thumbnailed photo of Stephen Crabb looking stetched? It's present also in the infobox on the Stephen Crabb article. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:45, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

A new version was uploaded, but the old one is probably stuck in your cache. Just purge the page. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:53, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Y - thanks, done, worked. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:56, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

How do I stop the standard User talk Editnotice from displaying ?

I have created my own User talk:BushelCandle/Editnotice which seems to work the way I want it to.

However, I would like to suppress the standard notice that appears immediately above it:
"This is a talk page. Please respect the talk page guidelines, and remember to sign your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~)"
and instead incorporate it into the top of my own customised notice.

Is this possible and, if so, how please? BushelCandle (talk) 04:47, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

The standard notice is MediaWiki:Talkpagetext and you can suppress it for yourself by adding

table#talkpagetext { display: none; }

to Special:MyPage/common.css. However, you can't suppress it for everybody else. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:32, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

And to be "technical", MediaWiki:Talkpagetext displays from a different part of the interface - not an editnotice. The user_talk editnotice (seen here: Template:Editnotices/Namespace/User talk) normally displays as blank. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:34, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

On a similar subject can I reclaim some real-estate by suppressing:-

Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 15:02, 20 March 2016 (UTC).

The html source of an edit page shows the text is in <div class="editpage-head-copywarn">...</div>. That means you can hide it with this in your CSS:

.editpage-head-copywarn {display: none;}

PrimeHunter (talk) 17:24, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

But again, you can not prevent it from being displayed to others. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:57, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for all the helpful responses. It's very useful to know that my fruitless quest is at an end and a solution does not exist. BushelCandle (talk) 21:24, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

The existing technical settings do not allow for this, you could propose that the community made new site-wide changes to suppress the existing notices for user-talk, but I think you'll have quite an uphill battle. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:43, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Odd edit

Any idea what this was about? It was the IP's only contribution. I've removed it. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:22, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

It just seems to be a random possibly complete dump of port numbers, along with some random ASCII art. People do that kind of thing sometimes. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 13:23, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Pageviewstats broken?

I've just looked at Pageviewstats for the viewing numbers for yesterday on R v R, however I notice that it doesn't seem to have recorded them. Is there a problem with the tool? The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 10:05, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

I see stats 4,224 views for yesterday. Maybe something in the system slowed the results. — Maile (talk) 14:16, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts

Can someone with some experience in Wikiproject templates help me with Template:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts? If not, where should I go? I'm trying to get two parameters to not be default parameters and to see if I can figure out how to create a cross-reference of two of the parameters here. Thanks! -- Ricky81682 (talk) 20:42, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Stats: New articles per...

I'm searching for a specific tool that shows number of new articles created per day/month/year across all wikipedias, together or for each apart. Last year I visited few times such a tool, but unfortunately I can't remember it and can't find it now. It was similar to https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcharts/wmchart0002.php but better :) --XXN, 15:38, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Try here: https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm Plantdrew (talk) 19:01, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Or stats:EN for short. --Pipetricker (talk) 19:41, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesNewPerDay.htm ? Valid answer, but it's not exactly that I search. I remember I saw stats on Wikipedias growth per period of time as a graph, very similar to https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcharts/wmchart0002.php Maybe http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/ has had in past such stats? --XXN, 01:30, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Weird NULL issue when attempting to view an article

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T130575

I am unable to load the article Desperado (roller coaster). When attempting to do so, I only see NULL at the top of the page and nothing else. Interestingly, I can get to Talk:Desperado (roller coaster). Any ideas? --GoneIn60 (talk) 05:47, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I get NULL when I try to access my contributions. Widr (talk) 05:53, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I just got it at Special:Block/14.200.52.29. I used the Twinkle module to block instead, and I haven't been able to replicate it anywhere else so far. --Bongwarrior (talk) 05:56, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Apparently it pops up in random pages for different editors - I see all pages fine, but I get NULL on my watchlist. Materialscientist (talk) 06:37, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I am seeing the "NULL" message when attempting to view my watchlist. I can see my contributions fine and also the Desperado article. Strange. AusLondonder (talk) 06:39, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I also get a "NULL" page when attempting to view my watchlist. Additionally, the UTC clock beside the 'Log out' link also fails to appear. — ξ^xplicit 06:45, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I just purged the relevant objects from the cache, which should result in no more NULLs to be displayed; I have still not found any reasonable root cause so this might as well happen again; please comment on the phabricator task if you find any page that still shows the problem. GLavagetto (WMF) (talk) 07:07, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-12

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

• Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
• In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed. [3]

Changes this week

• It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [4]
• You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [5]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 March. It will be on all wikis from 24 March (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2. [6]

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

16:04, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Notice that deployment of the new MediaWiki version on this wiki has been corrected to 24 March. (@Johan (WMF)). --Pipetricker (talk) 21:22, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, thank you. And my apologies for the mistake, the planned code freeze made me mix up the dates. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 08:27, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

User Interaction consultation

Hello, headsup that the Wikimedia Foundation's Reading team is currently running an experiment consultation, to explore ways on how to make Wikipedia more interactive. Please check the page to add new ideas or comment on existing ones. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Melamrawy (WMF) (talk • contribs) 16:59, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Archive on my talk page

Somehow archiving on my talk page does not work as intended. The archives template doesn't seem to work either. --Laber□^T 17:53, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/ClueBot III shows no edits since 29 February, and User talk:ClueBot Commons says: "ClueBot III is currently not archiving some talk pages, this issue is being investigated." PrimeHunter (talk) 19:08, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

It's a known issue and it's been going on for a while. It does run occasionally if you leave the settings alone. It last ran on my talk page on February 27, although that was the first time it ran on my page at all since I set up archiving on January 6. So ... yeah, intermittent. You could archive manually, or see User:MiszaBot/Archive HowTo for an alternative archiving bot which does seem to be running reliably. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 19:39, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

WDL template

Anyone that knows what has happened to {{WDL}}. I can not see that anything has changed but code that has previously been working on articles do not longer work, such as 2016 IFK Norrköping season#Overview. Please help. Qed237 (talk) 12:47, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

The sub-template Template:Number table sorting/error has changed recently, tightening up the detection of errors. The examples at Template:WDL/doc seems to suggest that inapplicable parameters should be left blank, not replaced with hyphen. -- John of Reading (talk) 13:01, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@John of Reading: Leaving blanks leads to incorrect number of columns when using goaldiff (see diff). The hyphen has been standard on every article I have seen it, which is why I used it when creating the article. Qed237 (talk) 13:09, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm not going to be able to solve this. Over to Jackmcbarn, I think. -- John of Reading (talk) 13:16, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@John of Reading: Okay, thanks anyway for your quick response and attempts to help. Qed237 (talk) 13:49, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@Qed237: Does a dash or blank convey something different than a 0 would? My first instinct is that using 0s is the right way to do this. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:17, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jackmcbarn: I guess not, it is just what I have always seen when a competition has not started. Qed237 (talk) 21:29, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Scotty Wong's RfA Vote Counter

So, are Scotty Wong's tools "publicly" editable, like XTools, are? Or can only Scotty Wong edit them? 'Cos his RfA Vote Counter is slightly malfunctioning lately – e.g. in my own entry, it's counting two recently closed RfA's as "Not closed yet", and I'm wondering if someone can take a peak and hopefully come up with a quick "fix" for that... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 21:43, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

@IJBall: That tool is run under the "jackbot" account, which is maintained by User:JackPotte. For you to be able to edit the code directly, you would need him to add you as a maintainer. I think you might also be able to make a pull request on Github as that's where the JackBot code lives, although I wasn't able to find the actual code for the RfA Vote Counter, and you should check with JackPotte about how he handles code submissions. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 01:54, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

OK, yes, that rings a bell. Thanks. (And me? Edit code?! No, no, no, no!!) --IJBall (contribs • talk) 01:56, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

@IJBall: - Basic computer science and an intro to coding principles in a free online 20 hour course. fredgandt 04:54, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

https://github.com/JackPotte/xtools/tree/master/public_html/snottywong%20tools. JackPotte (talk) 09:27, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

FTR, the RfA Vote Counter is still not working correctly (nor are a lot of Scotty Wong's other tools like AfD Admin Stats) if somebody wants to take a crack at this, now that the above Github link has been provided... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 03:21, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Some X 11 color names not supported in all browsers

Topic moved to Talk:Web colors#Some X 11 color names not supported in all browsers. --Pipetricker (talk) 10:55, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Problems with irc

Yesterday I spoke with an admin via irc; everything worked well. Today I can not enter a single chat nor do anything. There are red messages which I've never seen, nor do I begin to understand. Here is a screenshot of what I see after launching chatzilla:

Having no idea what happened, or is happening, I am asking for assistance here. Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 09:19, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

That looks like Freenode might be down; I just tried to access their web client at https://webchat.freenode.net/ and it's not working either. --Izno (talk) 11:16, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Izno. I am glad to say that you did nail it; and I have, in fact, logged-on to Freenode in full function. I appreciate your help kindly, and the first fruits given of your time. May you prosper as well, when that which is yours does come around.--John Cline (talk) 12:12, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Malfunctioning template?

I'm using the Template:Age in years and days. If I have date range March 19, 2016 - March 20, 2016 (1 day), then shouldn't the template produce two days instead of one day? — Preceding unsigned comment added by User:Mitchumch (talk • contribs) 02:02, 21 March 2016

This should probably be at Template talk:Age in years and days, but the issue concerns this result:

• {{Age in years and days|19 Mar 2016|20 Mar 2016|sep=and}} → 1 day

Someone born at noon on 19 Mar 2016 would be 1 day old at noon on 20 Mar 2016, so the result of 1 day looks good to me. Johnuniq (talk) 02:46, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Johnuniq I was trying to use this template for the duration of an event, not person. Is there another template for that type of use? Mitchumch (talk) 02:49, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't know, but see Wikipedia:Age calculation templates. Some funky {{#expr}} wizardry may be available but I can't look at that now. Coincidentally, I am working on Module:Date which will provide date functions and I'm currently wondering why it gets a different result for a particular {{Age in years, months and days}}, but it won't be finished for some weeks. Johnuniq (talk) 02:58, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

It's simple arithmetic. 20-19=1, not 2. When calculating durations to integer precision, you count either the start point or the end point, but not both. 19:27:28 to 19:27:30 is 1 second, not 2. 19:27:28 to 19:28:30 is 1 minute, not 2. 19:27:28 to 20:28:30 is 1 hour, not 2. So 19 March 2016 to 20 March 2016 is 1 day, not 2. Think of it like this: if somebody is born on 31 December 2015, they don't become 1 year old on 1 January 2016 (unless they are a thoroughbred racehorse foal). --Redrose64 (talk) 14:43, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I think I see what Mitchumch means. He's talking about something like an event that runs for several days and wants the number of days that it ran. So if the event started on the morning of Saturday, 19 March and closed in the evening of Monday, 21 March, it actually ran three days, not the two that result from the subtraction 21-19. Akld guy (talk) 18:46, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I see what Mitchumch means also, but one should not use a template called "Age" to do that sort of math. We don't get to modify the definition of the English noun "age", which is determined by simple subtraction. Google "how to calculate age" and you will find links to a variety of age calculators that all use simple subtraction to measure age.

Mitchmuch would need a way to calculate duration, as this web page does when you check the box marked "Include end date in calculation (1 day is added)". I suppose an option for this could be added to the template, like |add-day=y or something. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:15, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

If you know the start and end times (in seconds, but they don't need to be more accurate than to the nearest hour), what you could do is ceil((end - start) / 86400) --Redrose64 (talk) 13:20, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Bogus alerts

This diff gave me the following alert: Parsley Man mentioned you on the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge talk page in "Too long?". My name appears nowhere in that diff or even on the talk page. It looks like Roxy the dog may have similarly received a bogus alert. Is this a known issue? I skimmed through the alert-related bugs on Phabricator but didn't find anything, though I could have missed it. Manul ~ talk 14:34, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

It's not the diff text but the rendered result that counts. The diff used wrong syntax in attempted pings. It said {{user:NewsAndEventsGuy}} instead of [[user:NewsAndEventsGuy]]. The former transcludes user:NewsAndEventsGuy which is a redirect to User talk:NewsAndEventsGuy so everybody linked there, for example in signatures, were notified. The limit at Wikipedia:Notifications#Spamming prevents notifications if more than 50 users are linked (it has been 20 in the past). PrimeHunter (talk) 14:50, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Woof. -Roxy the dog™ woof 16:19, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Template:Awaken the Dragon

Resolved

Hi, can somebody fix the external link piping at the bottom so they look like the Template:Women in Red one? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:58, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Fixed. Spaces are not valid in URLs. It usually works best to copy the URL directly from the address bar of your web browser. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:05, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Cheers. Oh I did/do but my browser has the _ between words!♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:22, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

@Dr. Blofeld: You can do that, provided you use full internal link syntax including the interwiki prefix wmuk: instead of https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/, like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:57, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Disappearing deleted edits?

Looking at my admin stats, I saw my number of deleted edits has decreased by 244 recently. Checking Special:Contributions/Cyberbot_I, I noticed that many other admins also had fewer deleted edits than before. Does anybody know what caused this? —Kusma (t·c) 10:41, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

@Kusma: It ran more than once for some users. For example, my own was updated three times - only the second one has the correct figure for Edits+Deleted. I know this because I cross-check against Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits/1–1000 every Wednesday morning, and although they give different figures, they're predictably different. The thing to remember when comparing them is that the Edits+Deleted figure in Adminstats includes some of the figures listed below it, such as: Pages protected; Pages unprotected; Protections modified. It also includes at least two other counts - one is the number of times you've configured, altered or reset pending changes settings (and so added an entry to the Pending changes log); the other is the number of page moves, plus the number of redirects created as a result of those moves. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:25, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Tracking multiple transclusions

Is there any way to track pages that transclude one template but not another? In reality, any page that uses {{Episode list}} should also be using {{Episode table}}, but many television series pages still use raw code for the table header, and they should be converted. So, is there any way to track pages that use {{Episode list}} but do not use {{Episode table}}? Alex|The|Whovian^? 03:37, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

According to the math: this minus this = 5575, most of the transclusions of {{Episode list}} aren't accompanied by transclusions of {{Episode table}}. This doesn't tell you exactly which, but most is a simple place to start. fredgandt 04:41, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @AlexTheWhovian: You can use AWB's list comparer. I've dumped the list here. (Please move it if you would like to keep it.) — JJMC89 (T·C) 04:43, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you both. I wasn't aware of AWB's list comparer, but that's mighty handy. I've moved the page to my own userspace. Only the first list is necessary in this case; most of the content in the second list is because those particular articles use {{Episode list/sublist}} rather than {{Episode list}}. Alex|The|Whovian^? 04:58, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

to the original question: the inbuilt search is powerful enough to answer this question. it has codes, such as "hastemplate:", "incategory:", "linksto:", "intitle:", "insource:" (the colon is essential), and probably a few more. when you use more than one, "and" relationship is assumed. each of these can be prefixed with - (minus character) to signal "not". so what you want, in this case, is Special:Search/hastemplate:"Episode list" -hastemplate:"Episode table" (the quotes are not essential: if the template name has no spaces, you can simply drop the quotes, and if it *does* contain spaces, you can either use quotes like in the example, or you can substitute each space with an underscore). note that you can do "normal" searches in the subset of pages defined by the "codes". you can also use regex, but this is only available when using insource: keyword (i.e., you can use regex to search in the wikicode, but not in article parsed text). peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 05:21, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Preferred protocol for external links templates

I recently modified {{TED speaker}} to use https://www.ted.com/speakers/ instead of http://www.ted.com/speakers/.

Would it be better to use //www.ted.com/speakers/? Is there a policy/ MoS page describing this? Should we apply the latter to all external link templates for sites which use both protocols? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:50, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

We only serve our content as https these days, so there should be a preference for https (since relative protocol does nothing in that case). I know of at least one user (Bender something or other) actively converting Internet Archive and Google links to https, so there is precedent. --Izno (talk) 12:14, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: There is no policy, but we do have an essay, WP:PRURL. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:43, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

WP:EL mentions it at WP:External links#Links to Wikimedia vs. to elsewhere. That essay hasn't been updated to take into account the two RFCs regarding IA and Google, or the fact we only serve our content via HTTPS, so I would be careful referencing it (especially since the word "preferred" gets used, when in fact it's not). --Izno (talk) 17:11, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, all. Time for an RfC? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:32, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: As Izno indicated, Bender235 has for some time been changing http: to https: for Google and Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), per this RfC result, with no objections that I am aware of. PRURL could have been used instead in those cases, but he and others decided https: was preferable. If this is the same situation I don't see the need for another RfC. Here's some related user talk from last year. ―Mandruss ☎ 11:34, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to still use PRURL. Wikipedia is now delivered HTTPS-only, and this won't change any time soon.--bender235 (talk) 15:21, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Because HTTP HTTPS might be extremely slow as companies use a single server to MitM and we have reusers who use HTTP and dislike the expense and complexity of encryption. Also, I've noticed we're being overrun by political activists who are undermining the encyclopedia's neutrality to benefit their own groups. — Dispenser 17:21, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

I assume you had a typo there and meant HTTPS ("because HTTP"). Those rationale are not a defense of continuing to link to HTTP rather than HTTPS where we know that there is an available HTTPS link. --Izno (talk) 17:46, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Dispenser: Those who dislike the expense and complexity of encryption will avoid Wikipedia in the first place. Check your address bar, Wikipedia uses encryption. Re your political activists comment, I don't see how that applies to this thread. ―Mandruss ☎ 20:47, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

(Fixed typo, sorry) Making HTTPS available is (mostly) non-political, disabling HTTP is political. Why close the option to our reusers? — Dispenser 23:02, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Fixed your typo fix per standard (this allows future readers to make sense of Izno's response). ―Mandruss ☎ 23:20, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Why are our reusers relevant? The ones who care about their security will accept the HTTPS; the ones who don't but who don't want HTTPS and care will rewrite the various linkage; and the ones who don't and don't and don't care... well, we don't care about them. This was mostly covered in the two RFCs related to HTTPS linking for IA and for Google. --Izno (talk) 02:04, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Reuse is part of the WP:Five pillars, that's why its important. And your argument amounts to more pointless work for reusers. — Dispenser

Do we have consensus here, or not? If not, I reiterate my suggestion of an RfC, to resolve the matter once and for all. (I have absolutely no opinion, one way or the other.) Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:20, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Last chance for comments, before I start an RfC. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:58, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't understand what you think you need an RFC for. [7] establishes a general consensus for where certain kinds of links should be used, and [8] establishes a consensus for IA and Google to use HTTPS only (such that a bot can execute on that action). Any RFC you propose should be on the specific question of TED if you think the changes may be controversial. --Izno (talk) 13:27, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I argued against that consensus. HTTPS offers an impact hit on every server and browser/computer. It also does not guarantee "security" of the information transferred. I would argue that we should modify user preferences to allow readers to select the protocol and find a way to encode URLs to honour that preference. For those who want all of their content encrypted, they can insist on it. For those who don't want it encrypted, they can request it. We can determine what the default should be as part of the discussion on how to implement it. Walter Görlitz (talk) 14:31, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

@Izno Because different people, in various places, keep telling me that there is consensus, but for different things (and because there was no answer to my question here of 14 March). That said, I think this is the first time that the January 2014 link you have newly provided has been mentioned. It's closing statement says:

There is a clear consensus to "Use HTTPS links for HTTPS only sites, protocol relative links for sites that support both HTTP and HTTPS, and HTTP links for sites that don't support HTTPS at all". Note, however, that the discussion doesn't concern the implementation of this proposal, and therefore a new one should be initiated regarding this.

which seems to be contradicted by your earlier comment:

We only serve our content as https these days, so there should be a preference for https (since relative protocol does nothing in that case).

Also, I'm looking for a general consensus, not one that is specific to TED, nor any other single site. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:10, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: The January 2014 link is that general consensus; the individual site consensuses have been specifically to modify all uses of those protocols for those websites to HTTPS via (semi-)automatic method (so as to explicitly suggest that the edits being made do not run afoul of WP:COSMETICBOT). You can probably make an argument after-the-fact, if questioned, that those RFCs show that COSMETICBOT is not infringed on w.r.t. TED links, but it is usually better to show such a priori.

I suppose I should have caveated my comment regarding "so there should be a preference" as being my opinion, given that 2014 RFC, but consensus may since have changed and probably has, since the introduction of HTTPS-only Wikimedia. Regardless, without a separate RFC, use the consensus result from January 2014 to decide what kind of links you want to make. -- Izno (talk) 17:14, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

I'd like to reiterate that not every Wikipedia mirror uses HTTPS. Do not limit your scope to WMF owned servers. — Dispenser 19:53, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia email

My computer is an 18 months old Mac with the current software and my browser is Safari. My email doesn't work when I email another editor and I suspect it does not receive emails from other editors. There was a time when it did. Quite recently I got it to work once - I think because I got an admin to email me and after that I managed to send one message and then no more will go through. Although when it does go through I receive a copy of my message, when I get no copy I Now know the message has not in fact gone. I have re-checked ny preferences again and again. I occasionally fail to receive emailed notifications of changes and that is a puzzle too. Please tell me what I might be doing wrong. Thanks and regards, Eddaido (talk) 04:29, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Do you know which mail providers were involved on both sides? Something like Yahoo, GMail, or Hotmail? Asking because of bugs like phab:T58414... --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:50, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Try mailing me. I never have problems receiving mails. I have mailed you and got a copy in seconds. I think mails are sent but don't reach some receivers. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:22, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

From email me to you sending now

Sorry its 1:22am here and I missed your question. The answer is Yahoo. Is there a way to fix it? Many thanks for getting involved. Eddaido (talk) 12:26, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

I got your mail. You can use another mail provider for your Wikipedia account. See Comparison of webmail providers for some free options. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:33, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

@Eddaido: Yahoo has been a long-term problem for mails sent from Wikipedia, there's plenty in the archives of this page. See also phab:T66795. The only guaranteed solution is not to use Yahoo. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:01, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

New (to me) mobile site - images in header

Sorry my Wikipedia-foo is failing me and I cannot find out where even to ask this. I've been using the mobile site on ios (not the app) and it has an image at the top of the screen, which is generally the same as the one in the infobox. Where is it pulling this from - Wikidata? Is it the image property on a page's wikidata entry? Two copies of the same image in close proximity is sub-optimal and would like to debug this. Thanks. Secretlondon (talk) 19:36, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

I think mobile is using Extension:PageImages to select the "hero" image. --Izno (talk) 22:45, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

What does that mean in practice? Where does it get the picture from? Secretlondon (talk) 20:35, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@Secretlondon: In a nutshell, it looks at the images in the article and tries to choose the best one. It almost always (but not always) chooses the first image. Things that mean it might not choose the first image include if the dimensions of the image are suboptimal (e.g. it's a very wide image) or if the image is non-free (ever since T124225 was implemented). --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 20:41, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. The problem here is that we have the same image twice in close succession, which doesn't look good. Secretlondon (talk) 20:26, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) A hero image is a prominent banner image. As to where the image comes from in this case, according to mw:Extension:PageImages, it grabs the first meaningful, freely usable image on the page, which is often the infobox image.

There's also a Phabricator project here, which might be a more direct way to address the functionality. clpo13_(talk) 20:42, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Wrong page count in category

Category:Days of the year says "The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 354 total." when it actually contains 366 pages, one for each day, including leap day on February 29. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:31, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

This is a longstanding issue. T18036, I believe. – Jonesey95 (talk) 07:14, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

It's also come up on this page before, it'll be in the archives but I'm not sure what to search for. One thing I am certain of is that my signature is on the most recent relevant discussion. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:21, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

WP:Village pump (technical)/Archive 130#Count of pages in the category (October 2014)

toollabs:erwin85/categorycount.php --Pipetricker (talk) 10:01, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I looked at that thread an hour or so ago, but it's not the right one - it doesn't concern the issue where physically counting the page links below the heading 'Pages in category "Days of the year"' yields a figure that is different from the figure given by 'out of 354 total'. The latter figure is a match for the 367 given by {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Days of the year}}. There is a thread, earlier than Archive 130 (I've searched all subsequent archives today), that specifically concerns a discrepancy between the figures. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:18, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Certain articles on the iOS Wikipedia app show wrong images

The article on the TV show House shows a picture of Sherlock Holmes in the search results as well as in top image spot, on the iOS app. This is only one of several images within the article, and not the first one. The first image in this article is of the House logo, which should be the one at the top as well as in the search results. How can I edit this? werewolf 23:33, 21 March 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Revirvlkodlaku (talk • contribs)

The image is selected automatically and I wouldn't call it wrong as long as the image is actually in the article. It's just an unfortunate choice in some cases. I don't know how the image is selected. File:House logo.svg in House (TV series) is a public domain image so it's not omitted for copyright reasons. It's five times as wide as high and mobile search displays all the images in a square so that might be a reason it isn't chosen. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:45, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

It's selected by Extension:PageImages. Someone should poke the developers to see if we can get a "better image" in this case (presumably by tweaking the MagicBox algorithm which selects pages). --Izno (talk) 11:14, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your contributions, PrimeHunter and Izno. The image may not be "wrong", but I don't think it's the correct image to use as a representation of the show, that's why I think it needs to be changed. Another example of this type of thing, as another Wikipedia user mentioned to me, is that of Agnes Boulton. The first image in her article is that of her husband, so the title image, as well as the one in the search results is her husband's photograph. I would say this is problematic as it doesn't correctly represent the article. How can we fix this? werewolf 01:29, 25 March 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Revirvlkodlaku (talk • contribs)

This is caused by the community policy to limit use of non-free images (Wikipedia:Non-free_content#Exemptions), and and the resulting removal of non-free images from our images-API results (that power things like the lead image in apps). I agree with you that the user experience is noticeably diminished for some of our most popular pages: books, albums, movies, television.

It is also true that the change to the API forces does not allow for discrimination by the feature that is calling the image. Apparently, image search in visual editor is equally impacted and this is not a navigational element, the same goes for the app 'lead image'.

As mentioned here, I see 3 paths forward to alleviate the issue:

1. try and revisit policy or ask for a re-intepretation of existing policy (complete 'fix')
2. change API to flag image and let project/feature decide usage. This actually alleviates concerns around re-use. (partial fix)
3. prevent non-lead image sections from appearing in results or let users over-ride image. This is captured here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87336 and here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91683. (least complete fix--users lose out on valuable visual queues provided by the non-free images and see inconsistency between preview image and page)

Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 23:55, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jkatz (WMF): While this may be true in some instances, this is not what's happening here:

1. The image File:House logo.svg in House (TV series) is free (public domain), but too wide. A non-lead image with a not immediately clear relation to the article is chosen instead. (I think it's unfortunate the image is discarded for this reason. It would still fit in a hovercard. And could still be made into a square thumbnail for search by extending the white background. Although picking File:Hugh Laurie 2009 crop.jpg would also be a good alternative.)
2. The article Agnes Boulton does not have any image of Mrs. Boulton (free or non-free), so a non-lead image of Eugene O'Neill is chosen instead. (In this case no image would probably be better than an image of the wrong person.)

—Ruud 00:42, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Template issue

I want to duplicate a feature of the Template:Infobox military conflict in the Template:Infobox civil conflict, but don't know how to do it.

The feature I want to duplicate is a parameter called "campaignbox". It is an "optional field for appending a campaignbox template to the bottom of the infobox, which allows both boxes to float as a single element (useful if there are subsequent left floating images, which would otherwise not be able to float above the campaign box)."

I will also need to create a Template:Campaignbox for "civil" conflicts. The existing one appears to be solely for "military" conflicts. Thanks. Mitchumch (talk) 16:40, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Mitchumch, the whole "Template:Campaignbox" is just a {{sidebar}} with military colouring. you should be able to use a standard {{sidebar}} template for a non-military series. let me know on my talk page if you have a specific example. however, I do understand the desire to glue the sidebox to the bottom of the infobox to allow left floating elements to float past the block, so I have added a |sidebox= parameter to the civil conflict template. Frietjes (talk) 14:13, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Too many references

In List of Stuff You Should Know episodes, there should be about 840 references. However, instead all that appears is "Template:Reflist." I started playing around with it in my sandbox, and discovered that if I cut out some sections, I was able to restore the references. The sandbox is showing 637 references, although I don't know what the maximum number is. Is there a work around for this? Thanks! --BrianCUA (talk) 13:39, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Too many templates. See Wikipedia:Template limits#Post-expand include size. Time to split the list?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:59, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I've proposed splitting the article, as it's technically unmanageable. fredgandt 16:37, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

RfC notice: WP:CITEVAR scope, and citation coding (markup) vs. citation style (presentation)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#RFC: Is a change in citation markup method a change in citation style? (on whether WP:CITEVAR can be interpreted to apply to details of citation code formatting as well as overall citation style, e.g. Harvard, Vancouver, etc., citation styles).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:12, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

ru-wiki LinkSearch / api exturlusage issue

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T130912

I'm investigating T130912. Not being a Russian speaker doesn't make it too easy. Anyway, user of ru-wiki reports LinkSearch not working in AWB, which we do via mediawiki API. Seems like results from Special:LinkSearch page on ru-wiki web here give correct results and various mainspace pages for the "рус.башкирская-энциклопедия.рф" site. However with what I think is the equivalent search via the API here I only see 1 result in namespace 1 (I have simplified the call used, this simplified version shows the issue). So ostensibly Special:LinkSearch and equivalent API function (exturlusage) not giving same results. So could somebody please shed any light, is my API query somehow wrong or is there an API issue here, or something else? Thanks Rjwilmsi 09:14, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Updated the task with more info, and a patch. Anomie⚔ 22:26, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Why does this happen?

As you can see that arrangement gets reversed? Why? --QEDK (T 📖 C) 07:00, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

You refer to the left-to-right order of top icons changing from {green, yellow, red} to {red, yellow, green} when you preview User:QEDK. It's {green, yellow, red} in both cases in my Firefox 45.0.1. What is your browser? What happens when you log out? PrimeHunter (talk) 10:09, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, I use Firefox 45.0.1 too. When I log-out and preview, the order is {green. yellow, red} instead of the reversed pattern when logged in. --QEDK (T 📖 C) 11:48, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

That sounds like something in user settings. Have you enabled "Use live preview" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing? It's described at Help:Show preview#Live preview and gives {red, yellow, green} when I enable it. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:57, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that seems to be it. But, why? Anyway, thanks a lot. --QEDK (T 📖 C) 13:03, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't know the details but if you only load part of a page as described at Help:Show preview#Live preview then it doesn't surprise me that the layout can change. I wouldn't worry about it. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:26, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. --QEDK (T 📖 C) 15:50, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Citation autofill on toolbar not working for journals

When I use the citation autofill feature by clicking on the "cite" button on the toolbar (the one that is furthest to the right), sometimes it generates an error message saying the "month" parameter is not recognized. This seems to happen because the autofill tool is using an old form of the cite journal template that no longer works--that is, one that uses month and day parameters rather than one date parameter. Does anyone know if the autofill feature can be fixed to have it use the current version of this template, and if so, how can I contact the people who can fix it? Everymorning (talk) 00:00, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi. See Wikipedia talk:RefToolbar#Autofill not working for an albeit short discussion that seems to be about the same issue (although you added more useful detail). That's probably the best place to start your enquiries in any case. fredgandt 00:16, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

WP:Checklinks is still going bonkers

13 days ago I reported that WP:Checklinks is going bonkers by duplicating added accessdates. Today it is doing it again. (cc to @Frietjes and Dispenser:. I would like to be able to rely on Checklinks to do a tidy job. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 12:07, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
Reping Frietjes {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 12:09, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Strip marker problems with nowiki tags

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T27417

Whence came the oddness in infobox television episode?

Example 1

Above
Header

Example 2

Above
Header

Compare the infobox formatting in The Foretelling and The Archbishop - the title in the blue header in the infobox is larger and horizontally-centred in the latter (which is correct), but smaller and left aligned in the former (which is wrong, I think). I've recently made an (unrelated) edit to The Foretelling, so presumably it's showing the change there because the caches were flushed by my edit. Test editing The Archbishop shows the same defect in it, were it to be saved. The infobox by itself, in my sandbox, has the defect. So I think there's something gone wrong with the infobox template(s). That infobox is {{Infobox television episode}}, which depends on {{Infobox}}. I don't see a relevant change in the history of either. It's a pretty subtle change, so I can well understand how it can have been overlooked for some time. Can anyone see what might be causing this? -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 14:30, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Oddly, the issue is caused by the addition of {{abbr}}. See the current sandboxed version utilising the HTML entity . in place a a natural period character - Template:Infobox television episode/sandbox. This appears to be the fix. I would appreciate confirmation from other editors before pushing the change live. fredgandt 14:57, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Request placed at the template talk page - awaiting feedback. Albeit a seemingly trivial change, look what a dot in the wrong place can do! fredgandt 15:03, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

At least in my sandbox, your proposal doesn't seem to manifest as a fix ☹ Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 15:07, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, that's not good . However, although not a fix, it is the problem. At least that's one part of the equation. I'll continue looking into it. fredgandt 15:15, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Whoever fixes this might also fix the centering of the title parameter in mobile view. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:28, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Apparently whatever happened during my initial evaluation was an anomaly which I cannot duplicate; some kind of caching ghost or something. I thought it unusual that the use of a period in a simple template should be any problem, but that's what I saw. I will have another look at it in a while, but need to bathe my dog and rest my eyes (too many curly braces!). It's more than likely something more obvious that a stray period - like a style declaration -_-  fredgandt 15:38, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

We had a similar problem with {{Infobox television}} today. (See the discussion). The problem there seemed to be related to links to a subpage. The ability to customise the colour used in Infobox television was removed a long time ago but {{Infobox television/colour}} exists to allow 14 of the 37,122 articles using the infobox to still have differently coloured infoboxes. (I don't know why!) In order to solve the problem I simply commented out the links.[9] I don't know why it worked, as there have been no recent changes to the template and this has been working for years. --AussieLegend (✉) 15:44, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

I've now made the same change at {{Infobox television episode}} and the problem seems to be fixed. Please hold all applause for the person who can explain why this fixed the problem, because I have no idea. --AussieLegend (✉)

I believe there was some change to how nowiki tags are parsed since this seems to have fixed it. Frietjes (talk) 16:25, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

another one and here. Frietjes (talk) 16:28, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

I added two examples to show that it's <nowiki> tags that are causing the problem. Frietjes (talk) 16:32, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

this may be a _major_ problem considering how many of these color templates are using <nowiki> tags, e.g., all the meta/color templates ... Frietjes (talk) 16:35, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Yep, someone has changed how the nowiki (and perhaps other) stripmarkers are rendered. This is a percent encoded version of a nowiki stripmarker:

%7F%27%22%60UNIQ--nowiki-0000000E-QINU%60%22%27%7F – the %27%22%60 and %60%22%27 are new

The previous version was just

%7FUNIQ--nowiki-...-QINU%7F

If they changed this, no doubt they changed how nowiki stripmarkers are handled. Was there a reason for this change?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:03, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

@Trappist the monk: The weird "nowiki" text occurs when you put a "ref" tag after the pipe in a piped link: [[Main Page|<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page</ref>]] displays as [1]. 63.251.215.25 (talk) 17:24, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

References

This case (along with the <math> in the link text below) both occur with the old strip-marker format on fresh installs of MediaWiki. It looks like this is an open issue (T27417) from 2010. CSteipp (WMF) (talk) 23:05, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

3425 templates with "color" or "colour" in the title and "nowiki" in the source. So this isn't going to be fixed manually. Right? fredgandt 17:38, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Fred_Gandt can you provide an example where one of the meta/color templates are now broken? all the places that I have checked thus far, e.g., Aberdeenshire#Governance and politics, are still working. also, Template:Infobox election and Template:Composition bar aren't broken, as far as I can tell (probably because they don't use {{infobox}} or {{navbox}}). but, there may be some uses which are broken? Frietjes (talk) 18:22, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

@Frietjes: - Short answer = "no", which is my point. I'm not trudging through thousands of templates by hand to find which might be broken by this. A root or automated fix solution is needed; assuming the nowiki handling isn't broken, but rather is changed - I'd like to think this problem is an edge case which needs a special solution.

It seems that with vast numbers of these meta/colo[u]r templates, it would be prudent to scrap them all and utilise MediaWiki:Common.css to apply classes. The argument of course will be that only admin can edit it, but that shouldn't be a problem (all things considered). fredgandt 07:50, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

mw.html?

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

the first two infobox examples used to render the same. the odd thing is that example 3 works, which makes me think that it's a combination of nowiki tags and the HTML builder (mw.html) that's barfing? checking further, I get some interesting results from the following

Input	Output
{{str left|{{party color|Green Party (United States)}}|5}}	#
{{str left|#0BDA51|5}}	0BDA
{{#invoke:string|sub|{{party color|Green Party (United States)}}|1|5}}	#
{{#invoke:string|sub|#0BDA51|1|5}}	0BDA
{{#invoke:string|len|{{party color|Green Party (United States)}}}}	11
{{#invoke:string|len|#0BDA51}}	7

Frietjes (talk) 22:31, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

This is the Example 1 infobox output according to Special:ExpandTemplates:

<table class="infobox" style="width:22em"><tr><th colspan="2" style="text-align:center;font-size:125%;font-weight:bold;border-bottom:2px solid ?'"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000000-QINU`"'?;">Example 1</th></tr></table>

and it's accompnying raw html output window:

<table class="infobox" style="width:22em"><tr><th colspan="2" style="text-align:center;font-size:125%;font-weight:bold;border-bottom:2px solid&#160;?&#39;&quot;`UNIQ--nowiki-00000000-QINU`&quot;&#39;?;">Example 1</th></tr></table>

This is the output when the infobox is wrapped in {{code}}

'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000004C-QINU`"'<table class="infobox"><tr><th colspan="2" class="infobox-above" style="border-bottom:2px solid &amp;#35;17aa5c;">Example 1</th></tr></table>

This is the output as it is in my browser's source:

<table class="infobox" style="width:22em">
<tr>
<th colspan="2" style="/* invalid control char */">Example 1</th>
</tr>
</table>

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:32, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

It looks like the strip markers are being changed to /* invalid control char */ by HTML Tidy. That would explain why they appear in the HTML for the Special:ExpandTemplates preview but not in the HTML for this page. The change in nowiki tag behaviour doesn't seem to be caused by Lua. Strip markers have always been visible - and editable - from Lua, and Frietjes' example of {{#invoke:string|sub|{{party color|Green Party (United States)}}|1|5}} would have worked the same way before. The nowiki tags are converted to strip markers before they are passed to Lua, and MediaWiki converts them into whatever they are supposed to be after they are returned back from Lua. If you edit them while they are in Lua then they won't be recognised properly by MediaWiki after they are returned, which is what is happening in Frietjes' example here - the remaining characters left after the operation on the strip marker are just being treated as normal wikitext. The change in the nowiki tag behaviour seems to have something to do with how the strip markers are processed after they have been returned from #invoke, or from other templates or parser functions. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:18, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Mr. Stradivarius, it seems to be #invoke (and padleft?) and not templates in general. as far as I can tell, {{Infobox election}} isn't having any problems, but I had to change {{Infobox political party}} to use the div hack. Frietjes (talk) 14:10, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi Folks. My fault about changing the format of the UNIQ markers. I can confirm it was an intentional change, but I did not anticipate it would cause these problems (Sorry!). I am hopeful we will have this issue resolved by the end of Monday. User:Mr. Stradivarius's explanation above about why things are different in Special:Expandtemplates is a good guess, but not entirely right. The reason that Special:Expandtemplates is returning different results, is due to subtle differences between it and normal pages. Special:Expandtemplates parses stuff by first expanding all templates, and then in a second step, parsing the expanded templates to html (Normal pages do it all in one step). This is mostly the same as normal pages, except that it converts {{#tag:syntaxhightlight|...}} into <syntaxhighlight> instead of interpreting directly. Additionally Ascii delete (aka &#7F;) is removed at the beginning of each step, and UNIQ tags might not remain valid between each step. Last of all, I believe tidy is now applied to the output of Special:Expandtemplates, and the invalid control character thing comes from MW not tidy. BWolff (WMF) (talk) 04:33, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

What does I can confirm it was an intentional change, but I did not anticipate it would cause these problems (Sorry!). I am hopeful we will have this issue resolved by the end of Monday really mean? Why was it necessary to change the format of the stripmarkers? Does the ...resolved by the end of Monday mean that there will be additional changes? If so, what are they? Have you made a note in the code to warn future editors of these problems so that similar situations can be avoided?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:45, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

That he is a developer who says sorry for introducing an unexpected side-effect, and that he takes ownership of solving it, so that other ppl don't have to worry. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:56, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I got that and I appreciate it. Perhaps my quote is too long. What is not clear, to me anyway, is: I am hopeful we will have this issue resolved by the end of Monday. All of the subsequent questions that I asked are about that. I asked because, apparently, the intentional change (whatever that is) is still incomplete, may or may not be complete today, and so may yet further break existing templates and modules or rebreak those that have been 'fixed' to accommodate the intentional change.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:13, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

It means 1 of 2 things will happen: Either A: the change in strip markers will be temporarily reverted until we are sure we are not accidentally beaking anything. (This should not break any of the template fixes, as they were all back compatible, afaik). Or B: we will try to fix the issues identified. My proposed fix for these issues would be to make it so that syntaxhighlight always removes strip markers before highlighting (esentially making the extension treat nowiki the same as normal text). And making mw.html not mess with strip markers it puts in attributes. Ive been assuming that while the most pressing examples have been worked around , it is still causing problems and wikipedia would want this issue resolved quickly. If everything has basically been fixed and nobody's worried about this anymore, please let me know. BWolff (WMF) (talk) 14:20, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

The change of stripmarker form from (these shown percent encoded to include the delete characters):

%7FUNIQ--<name>-...-QINU%7F

to

%7F%27%22%60UNIQ--<name>-...-QINU%60%22%27%7F

where <name> is gallery, math, nowiki, pre, ref and ... is the unique identifier, was felt beyond the templates identified here. Module:Convert uses a pattern to discover <ref>...</ref> tags used within {{convert}} templates. Module:Citation/CS1 uses a similar pattern to prevent the inclusion of stripmarkers in the metadata that are part of each cs1|2 template rendering. Similarly, that module also relies on stripmarker detection to create simplified but meaningful representations of equations wrapped in <math>...</math> tags when they are made part of the metadata – typically journal article titles.

What was the purpose and benefit of making the stripmarkers more unique by the additions of '"` and `"'? You mentioned 'we'; is there a centralized discussion related to the stripmarker form change that I can read?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:44, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

"We" is the Wikimedia Security Team, so I also share responsibility for this, and add my apology. We're working on fixing an issue related to the strip markers, and we'll make the issue public once the fix is released. It's unfortunately a difficult balance to socialize that we need need to make a significant change when we don't want to make the details of the vulnerability public before we have the fix in place. I've just deployed the fix for Scribunto, so hopefully this particular situation has improved. CSteipp (WMF) (talk) 17:01, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Ah, understood. Do report back when the 'issue' is fixed, please.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:34, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Infobox on Dutch language looks broken

Hi! The Dutch language article's infobox is kind of not correct looking, because the name of the language (Dutch / Nederlands) is in fairly small print and left-justified, making it hard to read. Click this link to see a screenshot (PNG, 275kb) of the issue. The <th> and <td> tags have style="/* invalid control char */" which looks wrong. The issue happens in Firefox Developer Edition 47.0a2, and also appears to happen in Google Chrome "Version 48.0.2564.116 (64-bit)". Could this be fixed? Thanks :) Goldenshimmer (talk) 20:54, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

@Goldenshimmer: This edit has fixed Dutch language but it's knackered the template's own doc page. I've not undone my edit: given the choice of broken article or broken template doc, I'd go with the latter. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:14, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks @Redrose64! Yeah, I would agree that broken article is much more important 😛. I feel something of a fool now, since I skimmed this discussion yesterday, but didn't make the connection when I saw the issue today, even though I looked for a report… i think i might have assumed that it had to do with Template:Infobox language specifically…. Anywho, thanks again :) Goldenshimmer (talk) 21:33, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

I made a further change, which does not affect Dutch language but has fixed the documentation. The sum of my two edits is this: every instance of <nowiki>#rrggbb</nowiki> has become /**/#rrggbb

The /**/ is a valid CSS comment, and it's passed through untouched by the MediaWiki parser, and its presence hides the hashes so that they're not converted to ordered-list item markers, but remain valid RGB hex triplet markers. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:38, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Seems that the bgcolor= attribute of table cells doesn't like that technique. Never mind; it's obsolete in HTML5 anyway, so an edit like this is also necessary. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:50, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Redirects from plurals

Template:R from plural and the pages transcluding it such as numbers say '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000000-QINU`"' instead of [[link]]s. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:12, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

I wonder if this is the same issue causing the infobox fuckery above. The Template:R from plural page for me seems to contain the same delete character (0x7f) that shows up in the discussion of the broken infoboxes. I'm seeing: <snip /> Huh, the deletes are turning into 0x3f for some weird reason in the saved page, so let's try this: <snip /> Dafuq? I get why the entity I left the semicolon off of isn't working, but the first one? Let's try this again…

This redirect link is used for convenience; it is often preferable to add the plural directly after the link (for example, '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000000-QINU`"'). However, do not replace these redirected links with a simpler link unless the page is updated for another reason (see WP:NOTBROKEN).

^{/me googled it. Turns out html entities are decimal by default and need to be prefixed with an x to use hex… D'oh. :-S} Goldenshimmer (talk) 00:58, 13 March 2016 (UTC) Update: Refactored comments and cut out some stuff to make it less ugly to read. Goldenshimmer (talk) 01:01, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

I can't get those entities to work for some weird reason (I'm probably missing something obvious…) so yeah, just use your imagination that the ""s are actually, ya know, like, 0x7f. Goldenshimmer (talk) 01:08, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

^{(Edited comments again, cause I seem to have a semicolon deficiency today…. Goldenshimmer (talk) 01:10, 13 March 2016 (UTC))}

Examples of the problem that lead to the above (the third example works with no problem):

• {{code|<nowiki>[[link]]s</nowiki>}} → [[link]]s
• {{#tag:syntaxhighlight|<nowiki>hello</nowiki>|lang="text"}} →

  hello
  

• {{#tag:syntaxhighlight|<nowiki>hello</nowiki>}} →

  hello

A workaround would be to remove the nowiki and replace "[" with [, but a fix for the underlying problem is needed. Johnuniq (talk) 01:22, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

@GeoffreyT2000, Goldenshimmer, and Johnuniq: No need to encode the square brackets; if you check the documentation for {{code}}, it says "the template uses the <syntaxhighlight> tag with the attribute enclose="none". This works like the combination of the <code> and <nowiki> tags", therefore, there is no need to provide your own <nowiki></nowiki> tags, so I removed them. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:26, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

OK, I did this search for "UNIQ--nowiki" and got four hits. Two were <nowiki>...</nowiki> inside {{code}}; two were <ref>...</ref> inside wikilinks. All fixed. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:57, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, that has fixed Template:R from plural. However, my point was to show the wikitext in the template that used to work and which now results in a broken strip marker. Perhaps the nowiki should never have been in {{code}}, but should placing it there cause a strip marker to become visible? Johnuniq (talk) 10:59, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I wasn't trying to encode the square brackets. Rather, I was trying to encode the delete character U+007F. Goldenshimmer (talk) 17:48, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Indeed; but see comment by Johnuniq above, beginning "A workaround would be ...". --Redrose64 (talk) 18:09, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh, got it. Thought the ping meant the comment was responding to mine too, :P, thanks :) Goldenshimmer (talk) 21:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

It was a reply to everybody who had posted before me; you and Johnuniq both seemed to be going to a lot of trouble (with various encodings; re-editings of the posts here, comments like "I can't get those entities to work") to find what was really a very simple solution - simply omit the <nowiki></nowiki> tags. I mentioned GeoffreyT2000 as well by way of saying "fixed". --Redrose64 (talk) 21:35, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

To editor Redrose64: It's a lot of trouble to remove nowiki tags from everywhere, for example, I caught your edit to {{R from plural}}, but what about its category, which still shows the superfluous code as of 18:50, 14 March 2016 (UTC)? There are times when the nowiki tags may be needed, e.g., when using the {{Code}} template to render tlx|, which comes out as '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000034-QINU`"'. Omit the nowiki tags and the pipe disappears, as in tlx. Perhaps a better idea would be to leave the code alone and wait for the devs instead of telling people to omit nowiki tags, which may lead to more problems?  Follow Jimbo! Paine  18:50, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Fixing the cat page is easy. When do you need to put tlx| inside {{code}}? Do you have examples of pages where this is done? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:03, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Being an easy fix misses my point. The loss of the pipe in my example above is a subtle loss that may go unnoticed, and there are plenty other possible instances where the removal of nowiki tags might cause subtle yet important differences. An example of the tlx| inside {{code}} is actually how I found this problem that led me to this discussion. It's on my user talk page in a discussion with Martin at the end when I disabled some template loops. Point is, there should be no encouraging people to remove code (nowiki tags) until the devs have worked their magic.  Follow Jimbo! Paine  23:32, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Can we be sure that the devs will return things to the previous state? We can't. But if they eventually do, how long will this problem (which might be temporary) last? Do we sit around waiting and/or complaining, or do we assume that it may take months, and actually get off our arses and do something about it ourselves?

This bug/feature/effect is highlighting misused markup. Too often I see people using complicated techniques for situations that don't merit them - for instance, you don't need a <nowiki>...</nowiki> inside {{code}} when <code>...</code> does the whole job, like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:18, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you – I changed that last one back so it's easy for me to tell when the problem is fixed. This shouldn't be too difficult for the devs to fix quickly. I just think we're asking for more problems if we encourage the removal of nowiki tags, since subtle diffs could be missed. Some editors are more careful than others. It'll soon be a moot point, I trust.  Paine  09:18, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

One possible alternative, is if the lang is unspecified for {{code}}, to use <code>{{#tag:nowiki|{{{1}}}}}</code> instead of using #tag:syntaxhighlight. This would handle embedded nowiki's better than syntaxhighlight currently does. Bawolff (talk) 22:05, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I sandboxed that and it works well on my talk page; however, since {{Code}} is but one part of this problem, shouldn't we be looking for a fix that allows #tag:syntaxhighlight to work as well as it did a few days ago? so other issues reported above will also be fixed?  Paine  18:42, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

There are closely-related problems with {{bcode}} --Redrose64 (talk) 19:47, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Math inside wikilinks broken?

For markup like $e^{i\pi }=-1$ (markup: [[Mathematics|<math>e^{i\pi}=-1</math>]]; should look like: e^iπ = −1) where a wikilink encloses a mathematical formula, I'm seeing renderings like ?'"`UNIQ--postMath-00000001-QINU`"'?. This is with Chrome under OS X with the MathML/SVG-fallback option enabled. Is it happening more widely? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:46, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

The link works, it just isn't blue? 90.199.52.141 (talk) 20:49, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Under PNG it looks fine, but when I switch to MathML in the Preferences, the first and third wiki links have the UNIQ...QINU problem. This is also with OSX, Chrome Version 49.0.2623.87 (64-bit). So, verified, but I don't know the solution. --Mark viking (talk) 21:28, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I assume you know that this used to work? There have been a few discussions about broken strip markers recently. At #mw.html? above, BWolff (WMF) said "I am hopeful we will have this issue resolved by the end of Monday" although that was not in relation to math. BWolff might like to comment on this as well. The problem exists when "MathML with SVG or PNG fallback" is selected in Preferences for Firefox. Johnuniq (talk) 22:29, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, stripmarker treatment has changed, I think in connection with phabricator:T103269. This has also caused problems with <math> in citation template parameters (such as article titles and quotations) but that's under control (fixed in the latest sandbox version of the citation templates, to be included in the next monthly update). —David Eppstein (talk) 23:16, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

David Eppstein, I looked into how the strip marker change could have caused this, and it looks like this is a new case of an old, open issue-- T27417. If this only started recently, it might have been a change to the MathML processing. But I'm able to duplicate this issue on a fresh install of mediawiki, using the old strip-marker format, so the issue predates Bawolff's patch. CSteipp (WMF) (talk) 23:16, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Maybe a change to math processing exposed the math stripmarkers to the same problem that was already occurring with other kinds of stripmarkers? Anyway, thanks. Having a known bug to refer to for this saves the trouble of starting a new one. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:37, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

There is another bug for this specific problem, T130508.--Salix alba (talk): 16:36, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

May we get a firm timeline when this will be fixed?

I see this problem on template documentation pages almost everywhere I turn!  Embrace neutralisms! Paine  14:47, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

As it is related to a security issue, I very much doubt so. The fact that it is still there is proof enough that it is a rather troublesome problem to solve without reintroducing the security problem and thus logically a date cannot be given, because that would imply that the problem is predictable in complexity. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:57, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I do apologize for the delay in getting this fixed. I've just deployed the fix for syntaxhighlighter, so {{code}} and {{bcode}} should be fixed now. I believe that was the major issues with the template documentation pages. If you're still seeing issues, can you point me to some examples? CSteipp (WMF) (talk) 22:24, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

After looking into things again, it looks like the lua patch was dropped from the current deployment branch. That has been redeployed. So as of about 25 Mar 03:45 UTC, the issue with lua modules and the {{code}} templates should both be fixed, and things should be back to being parsed as they were prior to the strip marker change. Apologies, again, for the delay in getting this fixed. The next mediawiki release should be published soon as well, so we can make the issue behind this public. CSteipp (WMF) (talk) 04:02, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

To editors BWolff (WMF) and CSteipp (WMF): Thank you beyond words for fixing this multiple-page damage! I knew it wouldn't take you long! Happy E-day (belatedly) and Best of Everything to You and Yours!  Embrace neutralisms! Paine  13:59, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

CSS Image Crop

There is a problem with a file name unexpectedly appearing below an image generated by a css template, with a screenshot provided, at the discussion here (scroll down to "Image review". Help would be appreciated.--Wehwalt (talk) 16:02, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

@Wehwalt: The screenshot shows a copy of the image name instead of the usual "jump to the full image" icon, so this is something to do with the "magnify" CSS class. I noticed that Module:Location map generates <div class="magnify">[[:File:Foo.jpg| ]]</div>, whereas {{CSS image crop}} omits the pipe and the space, generating <div class="magnify">[[:File:Foo.jpg]]</div>. But that's as far as I can go, and I don't know whether that is significant or why Nikkimaria is seeing an unexpected result. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:58, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-13

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

Recent changes

• MediaWiki now supports the semantic web standards of Microdata and RDFa 1.0. On Wikimedia projects, a configuration change must be requested in order to enable RDFa 1.0. [10] [11]

Problems

• Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed. [12]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
• You will be able to remove the header and footer style from User language (babel) boxes. This will make it easier to use them with other userboxes. [13]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with part of the Architecture committee, which will discuss a few topics. The meeting will be on 30 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• The Architecture committee has sent a summary of new and ongoing RFC discussions.

Future changes

• Commons will soon have improved access to Wikidata's data. It will then be possible to access data about any concept on any page on Commons. Assistance with testing this on the beta cluster is appreciated. [14]
• Wikibits.js will not be loaded by default anymore starting April 2016. Gadget and script authors should have already updated their code since the previous announcements, but there is another migration path available if needed. See wikitech-l for details.

Corrections

• Last week Tech News said the new MediaWiki version would come to wikis from 21 March to 23 March. The right dates were 22 March to 24 March.

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

19:43, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

There's something wrong with XTools

Article info gives me an error which says "The ini file could not be read". The other XTools are at the moment having spotty reliability at best: at times they work, but in other times they take too long to load. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 00:50, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@Narutolovehinata5: Should be working now (it is for me). It was related to a permissions issue that the labs reboots brought to light. ~ Matthewrbowker ^{Drop me a note} 01:56, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, props to Matthewrbowker! He spent quite some time earlier today diagnosing this issue. Still need to figure out what's up with the edit counter, but I believe we have some solid theories — MusikAnimal ^talk 02:23, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

It appears the edit counter is now functional. ~ Matthewrbowker ^{Drop me a note} 05:21, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Unhidden category

Template:EPA content adds unhidden Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to the articles (currently only one article there). Could someone look if this cat could be hidden? Brandmeister^talk 08:49, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Done. The category has only a single member. Not sure, then, why we have the cat. --Tagishsimon (talk) 09:00, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@Brandmeister: Redlinked categories are never hidden. This is because the code to hide them must be placed on the category page; and if it's there, the cat page must then exist, therefore it's no longer a redlinked category. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:05, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Broken links table

I just moved Glen Parva railway station to Wigston Glen Parva railway station, following which Special:WhatLinksHere/Wigston Glen Parva railway station was empty for several minutes; most worryingly, the redirect wasn't listed there. Is this phab:T117332? Perhaps Matma Rex (talk · contribs) knows. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:14, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I'm afraid I don't know. But it looks like Special:WhatLinksHere is correct now. A delay of a few minutes is normal. Matma Rex talk 19:31, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

It used to be that it was updated so quickly that you wouldn't notice - to all intents and purposes it was instantaneous. If there is now a measurable delay, then fixing resultant double redirects - as we have been advised to do for years - might get completely missed. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:48, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Lots of white space in article

The Sephardi Jews article has lots of white space before the colums with pedigrees in the Sephardic pedigrees section, because of the "Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries" template in the section above that pushes down the table. I tried something to make the table float, but it didn't work. Can somebody look into it, please? Debresser (talk) 22:27, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

This was done[15] and the editor received a public "thank you". Debresser (talk) 00:24, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Special:Redirect not found

The page Special:Redirect has a 404 (Four-Oh-Four) error. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:58, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

The page works for me in Firefox but according to http://404checker.com/404-checker it returns a 404 Not Found status code. It shouldn't do that. I tested many other pages at Special:SpecialPages and they all returned a 200 OK code. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:25, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

404checker shouldn't be giving you 200's for anything, it should be giving you TLS redirects??? — xaosflux ^Talk 01:43, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Do you mean if https:// is omitted so the default http:// of 404checker is used? I include https:// like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Redirect (gives 404 Not Found) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log (gives 200 OK). PrimeHunter (talk) 10:01, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

IPv6 range contributions

Is there any tool available which will show all the edits from an IPv6 range? I have the gadget that allows viewing contributions from an IPv4 CIDR range turned on, but it doesn't appear to work with IPv6 ranges. -- Ed (Edgar181) 15:36, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that the same gadget allows IPv6 prefix search ( unless it is something that I pull in with my common.js ). However requires using an asterisk (*) after a colon instead of using an IPv4 style #.#.#.#/# subnet. It should show many of the contributions with that prefix. I think it is limited to 50 or so though. PaleAqua (talk) 02:50, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@PaleAqua: Thanks for the suggestion. You're right. I had tried Special:Contributions/2601:8c:4004:af05:* which returned nothing, but with the letters capitalized Special:Contributions/2601:8C:4004:AF05:* it works. -- Ed (Edgar181) 13:52, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Recycled url

The Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) Campaign lobbied from 2007 for a new UN gender equality entity, with a website at http://www.gearcampaign.org. It achieved its goals in 2010 and dissolved, letting the domain name lapse. Now the domain name is being used by a blog about electric battery technology. The effect is that links in the Gender Equality Architecture Reform article point to the home page of the electric battery blog. I changed the citations to look like:

• "GEAR Campaign History". {{cite web}}: |format= requires |url= (help); Missing or empty |url= (help) As of 2010-07-18 stored at http://www.gearcampaign.org/uploads/cms/_images/the-gear-campaign-background3.pdf

Is there a better way? This cannot be a new problem. I do not see anything about it at Wikipedia:Link rot. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

You should provide a |archiveurl=. --Izno (talk) 13:16, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

That would work if the pages had been archived, but on a search for the page the Wayback Machine says

Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.

See www.gearcampaign.org robots.txt page. Learn more about robots.txt.

So even if the pages were archived, the present version of the site is hiding the archived versions. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:36, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Seems like a "bug" with IA. --Izno (talk) 13:47, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

This is just IA being responsible and adhering to the robots.txt file of the website. We also have a https://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:52, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: The point I'm making is that that is the current owner's robots.txt. We do not know if the previous owner's robots.txt also required noindex. --Izno (talk) 13:58, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

• The "new" owner may be just a new name for the previous owner, like Alphabet and Google, and archive.org may choose to respect the current robots.txt setting whatever it was in the past. Anyway, assuming that for whatever reason we cannot find an archived version, how do we show we are citing a page by that name we found at that url on that date, which has since been replaced by something completely different? Aymatth2 (talk) 16:24, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@Aymatth2: Don't change the citations that way. It's a form of link rot, so use {{dead link}} instead. See Wikipedia:Link rot#Robots.txt. --Worldbruce (talk) 04:10, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

• I thought of that, but the link is all too live. An undead link, perhaps. I want a way to show that what was there is no longer there, but something else is. Otherwise someone will come along, check the link, find it is not dead at all, and remove the {{dead link}}. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:32, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

This should probably be taken up at Help talk:CS1. I can imagine adding a parameter that would suppress the url, and add appropriate categorization and messaging.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:54, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

• Good point. I have started a discussion at Help talk:Citation Style 1#Recycled urls. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:59, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Small improvement to standard Search Box

The current search box algorithm by Wikipedia for article searches implements a simple search with autofill option for linking to articles. Other major companies and institutions, like Amazon and others, who use similar search boxes offer the same feature, though they have significantly improved their versions to include a spelling correction facility to help users find their products and what they are looking for. It is fairly easy to implement an improved Wikipedia search box with simple spelling correction and perhaps it should be done. If someone misspells Dostoeievsky then they do not need to be told that their page does not exist or that a new page can be created. A simple spelling fix suggestion in the search box might be more useful and more user friendly. The current Wikipedia subtext of "Did you mean... option is the poor man version of what companies like Amazon and others have usefully implemented for their users. Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 16:23, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

This is being worked on by the Discovery team. I'm not sure which exact task it is, but [16] is the project board on Phabricator. --Izno (talk) 16:59, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi Fountains-of-Paris. What timing! The Discovery department just updated the 'smarts' behind the search-as-you-type "completion suggester" last week. The update brings better handling of spelling mistakes as you mentioned. You can read more about the update on the Wikimedia Blog. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 17:50, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

That's a nice link and it works for the correction of their test case of "David Bowtie" corrected to "David Bowie". I then tried it for my example of Dostoyevsky by typing the letter next to it by accident "Fostoyevsky" and it went back to "no page exists" mode. Do the coders of the new version know about this glitch that corrections only seem to catch the last letters of mistyped search box entries? Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 19:35, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I quote:

ebernhardson> thedj: we don't do fuzziness on the first letter, it was too expensive
ebernhardson> thedj: it would basically require iterating every possible article
ebernhardson> the short answer is a suggest takes 10-12ms of server time by handling the first character, and 2-3 ms by forcing the first character to not be fuzzy. This makes a very large change in the number of servers required to serve this feature

Hope that answers your question. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:06, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

@TheDJ and CKoerner (WMF): That clarifies a lot if you are saying that the algorithm currently being used is fixed at a 1-character or 2-character look-back for error correction in the simple search box. If I am reading this correctly, then could one of you tell me if it is an n-character look-back algorithm which is now being used starting at the end of the typed search box item which is limited to a 2-3 ms response time maximum? Or is it some other search-correction strategy? Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 15:03, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I believe that it's fixed at one character. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:51, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Exception encountered, of type "Exception"

I was contacted by a user who receives the message above (no stack trace) when attempting to log in to any WMF project. Does anyone have any suggestions for them? Cheers, Bovlb (talk) 16:33, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@Bovlb: See phab:T119736. Might want to add their username to that task so ops can fix the account. ~ Matthewrbowker ^{Drop me a note} 16:36, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, I have done so. The user and I are awaiting a response from ops. Cheers, Bovlb (talk) 19:18, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Resolved

Breaking change: wikibits

Beginning with MediaWiki 1.27 (April 2016) wikibits Javascript module will no longer load by default. In MediaWiki 1.28 (November 2016) it will be removed entirely. It is advised that code using wikibits be refactored to use modern replacements. See this email for more details.

wikibits identifiers

clientPC is_gecko is_safari is_safari_win is_chrome is_chrome_mac is_ff2 is_ff2_win is_ff2_x11 webkit_match ff2_bugs ie6_bugs doneOnloadHook onloadFuncts addOnloadHook runOnloadHook killEvt loadedScripts importScript importStylesheet importScriptURI importStylesheetURI appendCSS addHandler addClickHandler removeHandler hookEvent mwEditButtons mwCustomEditButtons tooltipAccessKeyPrefix tooltipAccessKeyRegexp updateTooltipAccessKeys ta akeytt checkboxes lastCheckbox setupCheckboxShiftClick addCheckboxClickHandlers checkboxClickHandler showTocToggle toggleToc ts_image_path ts_image_up ts_image_down ts_image_none ts_europeandate ts_alternate_row_colors ts_number_transform_table ts_number_regex sortables_init ts_makeSortable ts_getInnerText ts_resortTable ts_initTransformTable ts_toLowerCase ts_dateToSortKey ts_parseFloat ts_currencyToSortKey ts_sort_generic ts_alternate changeText getInnerText escapeQuotes escapeQuotesHTML addPortletLink jsMsg injectSpinner removeSpinner getElementsByClassName redirectToFragment

— JJMC89 (T·C) 13:16, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Is there a list of often-used gadgets and user scripts that will break once this change is rolled out? MER-C 14:14, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Well the loss of importScript will affect virtually everyone who calls any scripts on their own js pages. Nthep (talk) 14:50, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

There is no replacement for importScript. 19:58, 26 March 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ruslik0 (talk • contribs)

importScript should be replaced by mw.loader.load. I think it was a long-term plan to do this replace. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 21:15, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I've successfully upgraded User:John of Reading/common.js by hand. I wonder if a bot could do this? There could be about 27,000 affected pages. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:17, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Since only administrators and interface editors can edit other users' js and css pages, the bot will have to be either an administrator or an interface editor. Preferably, the bot should be a global bot and an interface editor because the change also applies to the other wikis. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 21:53, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't be keen on a bot doing this. I've changed the use of importScript on my own .js pages and it didn't take much working out. What is needed is a much wider advertising of the change and how to fix things to users whose pages will be affected - that is a task for a bot. Nthep (talk) 23:07, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, it's more an issue of knowing this needs to happen. Anyone capable of editing their .js pages to add a script can just as easily change the statements to the new function call, but if they don't know that they need to, then that's a problem. Also, all the documentation pages for scripts will need to be updated so new users don't add outdated code. Since this affects anyone using scripts, maybe a watchlist notification linking here or to an information page with steps for migrating? clpo13_(talk) 23:11, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree this needs wider notice and have posted at WP:AN. Here's a bunch of gadgets that need to be updated. MER-C 13:01, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately removal of importScript will break hundreds of scripts across hundreds Wikimedia projects and mw.loader is imperfect replacement of the importscript. Ruslik_Zero 20:19, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree; while mw.loader is generally good, importScript's desirable simplicity in referencing on-wiki JS files is missing in mw.loader.load. Here's a quick hack for those too lazy to properly update that restores it:

window.importScript = function (importPage) {
    var wg = mw.config.get(["wgServer", "wgScript"]),
        importUrl = wg.wgServer + wg.wgScript + "?title=" + mw.util.wikiUrlencode(importPage) +
        "&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript";
    return mw.loader.load(importUrl);
};

Note that scripts may still have errors from implied globals, because of the way mw.loader.load() wraps its output. These can be fixed by making the global explicit by specifying it as a property of the window object, as in the snippet above. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 23:55, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

So I just need to add this snippet to the top of my .js and importScript will continue to work? Is there a reason importScript is going away, it seems rather useful and more elegant? –xeno^talk 18:55, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

something is wrong here, IMO: for other stuff that were obsoleted, we received console.log messages (at least when running with "debug=true" address-line parameter), reporting this obsolescence. anyone using wiked or wikeddiff gadgets can see tons of such report in JS console, complaining about direct access to wgXxxxx global variables.

however, importScript() is *not* marked as obsolete even now, and there's no report in js console telling users to replace it. announcing something like this on WP:VPT in enwiki is grossly inadequate. i can see no justification for such a breaking change.

the fact that there is no adequate substitute for importScript anywhere in mw libraries is even more puzzling (for instance, if i remember correctly, addPortletLink() was obsoleted long time ago, with a message instructing to use "mw.util.addPortletLink", and during the time since it was declared obsolete, practically all call-sites were converted. other such functions were handled similarly (appendCSS => mw.util.addCSS, etc.) nothing like that happened with importScript and importStylesheet(). the least i'd expect is for "someone" to create mw.util.import(Script|Stylesheet), add "obsolete" marker to wikibits functions, and give the communities some time to convert. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 15:35, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Read the email. It hasn't happened yet. Load by default goes first with Mediawiki 1.27 next month with the wikibits removed in a further release in November so that's the 6 month period for people to convert etc. Nthep (talk) 15:41, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

@Nthep:: removing "load by default" _is_ a breaking change: stuff that works today will stop working, and will require code change to work again. whether this code change is manually loading wikibits or rolling your own "importScript()" is irrelevant.

TWISI, for wmf to be considered "good citizens", 3 things need to happen before removing the "load by default":

1. mark *all* wikibits functions as "deprecated" or "obsolete", so calling them will leave a mark in JS log. this is how these things were done until now, and we came to expect it. please don't surprise us.
2. offer good substitute for each function removed. most functions have them, but not all: as several people noted in this section, there is no reasonable substitute for some of the calls, specifically import(Script|Stylesheet)
3. allow the communities reasonable time to go over the obsolete calls and update the call-sites.

removing "load by default" _is_ a breaking change, so claiming you give people 6 months to adjust is just not true. not marking the calls that are going to disappear as "obsolete", is being less helpful than you can be. not providing good substitute is just wrong - why should every single project have to place the code User:Nihiltres in their mediawiki:common.js, when it clearly blongs in mw.util ?

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 18:28, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that we should have a solution in mw.util or mw.loader. It would be better if we had a simple mw.loader.wikiLoad() or something, with the same basic functionality (probably worthwhile to add importCSS functionality as well, with type defaults based on page suffix). The mw.loader.load() functionality is built around server-side registration of modules, while user code has to use the ugly URL-based fallback. In the long term, with plans to create Gadget namespaces and such, it's not so bad, but until we have that, a clean way to load wiki-based JS/CSS pages is quite desirable. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 19:19, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

@Nihiltres Beware that mw.util.wikiUrlencode (from mediawiki.util) requires a dependency as otherwise it may be undefined in race conditions. A shortcut for local wikis in Common.js could look as follows instead:

window.importScript = function (pageName) {
    mw.loader.using('mediawiki.util').then(function () {
        var conf = mw.config.get(['wgServer', 'wgScript']),
            url = conf.wgServer + conf.wgScript + '?title=' + mw.util.wikiUrlencode(pageName) +
                '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript';
        mw.loader.load(url);
    });
};

Modules like mediawiki.util won't load multiple times (it's a ensure command, it'll run immediately if loaded already). Also note, the site module (Common.js/css) is still guaranteed to load before user module. Defining this in MediaWiki:Common.js is supported and will work! –Krinkle 00:34, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Good catch. I'm pretty sloppy about remembering to wrap things with mw.loader.using(). {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 03:52, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think having to put in the full URI into mw.loader.load is a bit outrageous. That's super annoying and turns our personal JS into a wall of text instead of a concise and legible line by line list of scripts. Call me crazy but I think enwiki should just add our own importScript as Nihiltres has created above, at least until mw.loader.wikiLoad or the like is available — MusikAnimal ^talk 05:51, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

DISPLAYTITLE is NS:2

In this edit I added a custom title to my userpage via DISPLAYTITLE, but seems that it doesn't work - I see no changes in page title. Do anyone know why? --XXN, 14:33, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Please look at Template:DISPLAYTITLE/doc#Examples - specifically the last one: there are technical limits on how different the display title can be from the technical title. I'd say that the punctuation you added makes it too different. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:58, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

new citation template displays documentation box and description box after displaying reference

I'm in the process of making Template:Cite archival metadata, which I basically stole from Template:Cite open archival metadata. When I use it on my sandbox, it displays a description of the page and a blank documentation box after the reference citation. I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to writing templates, so I feel like I probably made an obvious error. I deleted a part of the template that would have explained the page description box (on my sandbox it says "this is the sandbox page..."); but after purging both the template and my sandbox it persisted.

Could you help me understand what's going on? Much thanks for any assistance you may offer. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 18:35, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

I have added <noinclude>...</noinclude> around {{Documentation}}.[17] PrimeHunter (talk) 20:30, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for helping with this simple thing! I will never again underestimate the importance of noinclude. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 16:04, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Creating a bot to identify out-of-date information in Wikipedia entries

There are a mass of entries in English and Chinese Wikipedia that include out-of-date facts or references. And there are some existed software tools or algorithms relative to natural language pattern matching to solve this problem. We would like to measure the usefulness of these tools and algorithms and create a new bot to identify those information based on the result of measurement. During the work of measuring existed tools and testing the new bot, we will try to collect abundant Wikipedia entries and create some new cases. And the modular software can be used by Wikireview and other contributors of Wikipedia.

URL of detailed proposal is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Searching_for_out-of-date_information_in_wikipedias

Please give us your advice in the discussion board of the proposal: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/Searching_for_out-of-date_information_in_wikipedias

Li Linxuan (talk) 16:22, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Single edit tab

I've just posted information about an upcoming change for editors who have the visual editor enabled. The information is at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 52#Single edit tab. If you currently have two edit tabs (Edit/Edit source), then this will give you the options of having only one Edit button, if you prefer that. Please read that information, and share it with other editors. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:30, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

New page created by IP?

Somehow, an IP-editor has managed to create Talk:El Gabacho. Pretty sure that shouldn't be possible. (Note: CSD-tagged as combined WP:G8/WP:G3, so if it appears as a redlink at some point, that'd be why) AddWittyNameHere (talk) 04:16, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

IPs have pretty much always been able to create talk pages, even if the corresponding article doesn't exist. I think a lot of junk gets missed there, but there's a lot of useful stuff going on like anons creating the talk page to add project tags and whatnot. --Bongwarrior (talk) 04:33, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Could the talkpage creation be controlled via pending changes? With something clever to add a category such as "Talk pages created by IP editors" so they can be easily spotted? Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 13:20, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Metadata

If this the most effective way to emit metadata on licences for images? I did question whether spans were better than divs but was told they are not. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:30, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure I believe that argument that the parser will wrap <span>...</span> tags in <p>...</p> tags. That may be true for raw <span>...</span> tags in article text but may not be true for template output. Before the <cite>...</cite> tag's css was fixed, the cs1|2 templates were wrapped in <span>...</span> tags and that didn't cause extraneous <p>...</p> tag insertion.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:38, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

NOINDEX

Is there a problem with NOINDEX? I was under the impression that userspace are noindexed and that pages in Category:Noindexed pages aren't actually indexed. As I noted at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Streetseekers/Blackwater Primero, there's an five year old userspace draft for a rapper that is literally the only relevant item if you search for his name. Now, the fact that people still want to keep that is another problem but the point still stands, if that is kept, how in the world can I actually get it not indexed since we don't have a dozen British rapper/DJ articles posted afterwards? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 04:49, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Ok, I was informed that the problem is probably that the mainspace version at Blackwater Primero used to be a cross-space redirect to the userspace one and because mainspace is indexed, google hasn't catch up yet. Interesting bug. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 05:29, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

User space is not NOINDEXed by default, it is only NOINDEXed if you add appropriate code, such as by adding the {{Userspace draft}} template, or by adding a |noindex=yes parameter to a {{user sandbox}} template. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:43, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Um, actually it is - or should be - now by default.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:47, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, since Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 126#Userpage drafts shown in search engines. –xeno^talk 09:43, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

It's opposite. The green triangle in Google's search gives a "Cached" link which shows Google cached the page 12 Mar 2016 19:19:06 GMT where User:Streetseekers/Blackwater Primero was a redirect to mainspace after a move [18] to Blackwater Primero. The redirecting version was overwritten and deleted when the page was moved back 28 March so the user page should be removed from Google next time they visit it. Redirects from userspace to mainspace are not noindexed. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:00, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

RfC: Linking to talk page sections from multiple issues templates

An discussion after an edit request at the template protected {{Multiple issues}} about whether and how to include single or multiple links to related talk page sections in the condensed interpretations of the child issue templates has reached an apparent impasse.

Your input is thus hereby requested there. fredgandt 10:04, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Watchlist legend

Hello, regarding design of watchlist explanations. Could someone more knowledgeable in code remove "Pages that have been changed since you last visited them are shown with a green marker" from under "You have 999 pages on your watchlist" and add the explanation of the green and blue bullet to Template:Watchlist legend? It has been suggested by a few other people as well. Thanks! Renata (talk) 03:51, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

It cannot be done in a good way here at the English Wikipedia. Template:Watchlist legend is only designed to imitate the actual watchlist legend for display in Help:Watchlist#How to read a watchlist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?uselang=qqx shows the real watchlist legend is built from a bunch of MediaWiki messages which each have a specific placement and are designed for a specific message. There is no message suited for adding an explanation of last visited markers in the legend. MediaWiki:wlheader-showupdated is intended for it and MediaWiki displays it in another place above the "Mark all pages as visited" button. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:12, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Adding/changing information for pagecounts-ez dump

I'm having difficulty figuring out the encoding for page titles in the dumps at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/. For example, with pagecounts-2015-01-views-ge-5-totals.bz2, I can see

• en.z %D9ˆ%D9Š%DA%A9%D9Š%D9%BE%DB%90%DA‰%D9Š%D8%A7:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License 8
• en.z (-)-2£]-(1,2,4-Oxadiazol-5-methyl)-3£]-phenyltropane 8
• en.z 07_Zgå‚oå›_Siä™ 10
• en.z 1._Fc_Kã¶ln 10
• en.z 1._Fc_Slovã¡cko 8

UTF-8 conversion dies on this. I wonder if the encoding could be added to the documentation at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/?

Also the url link at the bottom of that document is wrong (although the text form is correct)

HYanWong (talk) 20:19, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Bot assistance

Do we have a bot, possibly launchable by users on selected pages, that can fix duplicate key ref errors or such work requires human input? I'm asking because I stumble upon multiple such pages and fixing them manually is tedious (actually the related category currently lists 24,319 such pages, including good article Greco-Persian Wars). Brandmeister^talk 21:52, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

@Brandmeister: The problem is that such a bot would have to remove one of the definitions of the duplicate reference name, and to do that it would need to know which reference definition is the correct one, something which needs human input. — Omni Flames (talk contribs) 03:29, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Old gadget stylesheet stuck in ResourceLoader

Krinkle, Can saomeone purge MediaWiki:Gadget-NewMainPage.css from whatever place possible? An old revision is stuck inside <style>...</style> tags and there is nothing I can do to clear the problem. I tried purging a thousand times, null-edits, deleting/disabling the gadget; nothing works! I'm quite desperate now... -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:26, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

It seems the only results I can get is the bad styling, or no styling at all... I am now getting quite aggitated. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:35, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

I posted a link to this on IRC, but it's Hackathon weekend, so I'm not sure whether anyone will see it. I hope that the problem clears up for you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:47, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Can you be more specific about what is stuck? — xaosflux ^Talk 01:24, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

I think special:diff/713285084 should do it, since the hash that ResourceLoader uses for caching is different now. I also merged gerrit:281232 so purges will work again in the future. Legoktm (talk) 02:57, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Apparently, Chrome was also partly to blame as I had to completely purge all website data (basically a reinstall) by hand before it was fixed. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 07:57, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Edit request button leads to wrong target

I was trying to submit an edit request for Module:Message box, but the "Submit an edit request" button leads me to Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors. Perhaps it's because of the casacde-protection due to being transcluded on the main page. nyuszika7h (talk) 11:40, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

That is why it is going to the wrong place, we will have to look in to it. You can go to the talk page manually to make the request for now. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:22, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

It looks like this behavior was specifically added by Mr. Stradivarius in this edit. He can probably clarify the reasoning behind it. Anomie⚔ 07:08, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

I added this because I was seeing a lot of edit requests to update things on the Main Page made on the talk page of the protected page, instead of the proper place, which is WP:ERRORS. A lot of the time, requests made on the talk page with the {{edit protected}} template are answered more slowly than at WP:ERRORS, and typically the admins who patrol CAT:EP are more technically minded, but requests for the Main Page will be more content-oriented. The upshot of this was that these requests were often not answered until the item in question had rolled off the Main Page. This is something that we want to avoid for content-oriented requests, but for technical requests for updates to templates and modules, etc., WP:ERRORS is obviously the wrong place. Maybe we could refine the algorithm to reduce the false positives somehow? For a start, requests pages in the module namespace can probably be safely be directed to the talk page rather than WP:ERRORS. Templates will require more thought, as we have things like Template:Did you know and Template:In the news where content meant for the Main Page is added. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 08:42, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Maybe such switches could be added to MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext and {{protected page text}}, or would they result in performance issues?Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:46, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't think the performance difference would be signficant. So it's just a simple matter of programming. ;) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 09:17, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Curious: Category P count negative

Might have happened before, but I met a negative cat P count. -DePiep (talk) 23:20, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm not seeing this occuring anymore, are you? — xaosflux ^Talk 01:27, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

No, it's gone. BTW, it happened right after I completely de-populated the category (through its template). -DePiep (talk) 10:59, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Removing Wikidata bots from watchlist?

I like having Wikidata on my watchlist, and I like having Wikipedia bots on my watchlist, but the Wikidata bots just seem to clutter everything up. Is there a way to just remove the Wikidata bots while leaving the Wikipedia bots and the rest of Wikidata on my watchlist? Cheers, -- Irn (talk) 12:48, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

@Irn: don't think so, but you can ask there. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:59, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Will do, thanks! -- Irn (talk) 17:16, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

FaZe Clan log says unprotected but it isnt

Nothing else on the protection page shows protection and it clearly isn't.Doug Weller talk 04:55, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

We have had previous reports that on rare occasions, protection is lost when a page is moved (although it should be preserved). I think that this is one of them. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:33, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I've restored the protection that was lost when Pastorma (talk · contribs) moved the page. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:42, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Doug Weller talk 09:01, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Box with notes

Hello. Is there a way, when the cursor is on a word, to show a small box with some notes for this word? Like the reference box but not to list in the bottom on the article. Xaris333 (talk) 15:28, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

What you describe sounds like a tooltip. It's usually generated from the title= attribute of a HTML element (try hovering your mouse over these three words), but care must be exercised in its use, for accessibility reasons amongst others. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:33, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Thx. Xaris333 (talk) 12:11, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-14

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

Recent changes

• You can filter Special:Log in more detail. [19]
• Wikimedia wikis have a new way of counting visitors. [20]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 6. It will be on all wikis from April 7 (calendar).

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

22:13, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Wales/Awaken the Dragon/Stub Obliteration

Hi, can somebody sort it out so that the articles listed by contestants have the bullet points and number centralised rather than spreading across the page when you add more text?♦ Dr. Blofeld 09:53, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

comme ça --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:03, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Qualtrics survey on messages

Posting here because no one reads the meta forum, and foundation wiki is read only.

The questions which require dragging don't work.

The first question about flow has a bad set of answers - they do not cover all cases.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:01, 4 April 2016 (UTC).

Using the latest Firefox, worked fine. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 02:11, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Hello Rich

Which survey is it? The one concerning Notifications?

Which browser do you use, and what is its version?

Thanks, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 08:32, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes the notifications one. Palemoon Version: 26.1.1 (x86). All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:31, 5 April 2016 (UTC).

Undo gives Error message on Talk page RfC

An editor has requested that a closed RfC be reopened after obtaining a second opinion to support his request. But when I try to undo the RfC closing edit there [21] it gives only an Error message. Since the request to reopen the RfC on Talk:English Democrats has been supported by a second opinion already then anyone can reopen it if someone can undo the linked close and not get the Error message. Could someone look at it. Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 19:02, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

@Fountains-of-Paris: Do you mean this message? It's because this edit has changed the situation. Try undoing that one first, then the one that you have trouble with. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:39, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Autopatrol protection

Protection not assigned "editextendedsemiprotected" autopatrol and admin protection. --BasBibi (talk) 03:47, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

@BasBibi: I'm not sure what you are asking for here. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:01, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

@BasBibi and Redrose64: When an admin protects a page, the null edit is now marked as autopatrolled. For example, 1995–96 Chicago Bulls season was protected and revision 713794177 was autopatrolled. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:06, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Autopatrolled is nothing to do with individual revisions or protection. It's applied to the whole page from the moment that it's created by somebody with that right. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:10, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Captcha broken

The captcha interface at ClueBot NG Report Interface is broken, it does not accept correctly entered strings. (It's also a different captcha from the one Wikipdia uses) Can it be switched to the SolveMedia system or something that actually works? Does this thing require Flash or something? (If it does, there should be a big warning about what should be installed/allowed to use the page)

-- 70.51.45.100 (talk) 04:13, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Non-empty disambiguation categories

Category:Buildings and structures in Georgia is a disambiguation category, so it should be empty, but it currently has a subcategory. We already have a way of detecting non-empty categories; see the warning immediately below the template in this test diff. Is it possible to introduce a feature into {{Category disambiguation}} whereby it would use the same feature to study whether the category's empty, and when it's not, it would transclude a maintenance category comparable to Commons:Category:Non-empty disambiguation categories? Nyttend (talk) 01:42, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

It's certainly possible, as the following code does the same with {{category redirect}}:

{{#ifexpr:{{PAGESINCATEGORY:{{PAGENAME}}|R}}|[[Category:Wikipedia non-empty soft redirected categories]]}}

However, this won't categorize and decategorize the page in real time. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:15, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

What's the action that needs to be taken when a disambiguation category contains a subcategory? Just remove the disambiguation category from the subcategory? Sounds like a good task for a bot. I'll set up a tracking category for these in a few hours if no-one else gets to it. ~ Rob^Talk 15:01, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

More like figure out which category should be used, and replace it. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:15, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, true. That requires human intervention, then. Setting up the tracking category now. ~ Rob^Talk 15:16, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

See Category:Non-empty disambiguation categories. We'll have to wait a half hour or so to see if there's actually a backlog here. ~ Rob^Talk 15:29, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

How to delete a page?

Someone had posted an incorrect redirect from White-swelling to Seroma. White swelling can refer to any number of things, seroma being only one of these -- so the redirect was inappropriate and misleading. I did erase the redirect, but don't know how to delete the now empty redirect page. Milkunderwood (talk) 06:02, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

The term "white swelling" does not appear anywhere on the Seroma page. As suggested on that page, by analogy, it could as easily refer to a pus-filled abscess. A search on the term brings up mostly articles mentioning a swollen knee joint. It's also used to describe a tubercular infection of the bone, usually of the spine. Milkunderwood (talk) 07:00, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

@Milkunderwood: The redir was created 08:58, 27 May 2012 - if it was recent, you could have tagged it {{db-redirmisnomer}}, but as it was so long ago it's really a WP:RFD matter. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:04, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Milkunderwood, you might post this at WT:MED; it sounds like it could be a reasonable WP:Disambiguation page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:12, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Automatic rcat for moves

I've noticed that some older moves had {{redr|from move}} automatically placed on them, but now it seems to use {{R from move}} instead. I don't know when or why this was changed, but I think it should be restored to the previous behavior, as {{redr}} is more robust, including automatically sensing protection levels. nyuszika7h (talk) 18:10, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@Nyuszika7H: You may be interested in MediaWiki_talk:Move-redirect-text#Redr, because I suspect that (unclosed but 30-days-past) RFC is probably relevant to your comments. --Izno (talk) 18:22, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

{{R from move}} is automatically added to redirects created when moving a page, this began at 08:44, 18 October 2013 when I created MediaWiki:Move-redirect-text‎; before that no template was added automatically. Template talk:R from move#Request for comment has background.

There was a short period (05:51, 6 October 2015 to 16:15, 11 November 2015) when {{redr|from move}} was used instead. I expect these "older moves" noticed by Nyuszika7H (talk · contribs) date from that five-week period last year.

As regards restoring that behaviour, see User talk:Mr. Stradivarius/Archive 23#Redirects from moves and User talk:Redrose64/unclassified 14#Move redirect text. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:55, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Wma.wmflabs.org down

Does anyone know why wma.wmflabs.org is down? It's responsible for every map in the dropdown maps that are on articles, so I assume someone has logged this somewhere else, since it is kind of relevant to this project. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 16:23, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

This was broken by a recent DNS upgrade on labs. It's a subcase of this bug: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131367 -- I've put in a one-off hack that will fix it in the meantime, but if/when someone tries to modify the proxy setup in Horizon the effects will be baffling :( Andrewbogott (talk) 19:16, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I have filed a ticket here, but it appears as though Andrew has a better link above, to the issue. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 19:18, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Possible improvement of {{afd2}}

When the page name has a slash, this template wouldn't function properly [22], and led to deletions of many redirect pages to US [23]. --E8xE8 (talk) 14:28, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Unless the closing script below somehow calls upon {{afd2}} to identify the name of the page (and its redirects) to be deleted, I don't think this template was the problem. postdlf (talk) 16:58, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Bug in User:Mr.Z-man/closeAFD

I'm crossposting this here as well as at User talk:Mr.Z-man, because the editor hasn't been active in months. This is a commonly used (and very useful) script that apparently gets confused when a page name has a forward slash in it ("/"). So when I closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Station not stream outside Canada/US as delete using this script, it ignored everything before the second forward slash in the page name and so deleted US and all other redirects to United States (it probably would have deleted that page as well if I had Steward rights to delete a page with so many edits). Quite a mess to clean up... Anyway, hopefully someone can take a look at the code at User:Mr.Z-man/closeAFD2.js to see if this can be fixed. postdlf (talk) 14:34, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Who's good at Javascript regexes? Does var patt = /\{\{la\|([^\}]+)\}\}/gim mean what I think it does? It's right under the comment "get the articles involved", but I'm having a little trouble parsing this to understand if the [^\}]+ actually indicates any snippet of text after a /. Wnt (talk) 21:10, 5 April 2016 (UTC) ... Hmmm, this seems to be looking for the {{la|Station not stream outside Canada/US}} in the article. Breaking it down I see / ... /gim around \{\{la\|([^\}]+)\}\}. That matches {la| ... }}. Inside that I see ([^\}]+), OK, that's anything NOT } inside the brackets... nay, as suspicious as it seemed that oughtn't be pushing the US separately on closeAFD.titles. There's another regex after that CloseAFD.debate.replace(/ \(\w+ nomination\)/, but unless it has CloseAFD.debate wrong it shouldn't ... hmmm... but that actually is set by mw.config.get('wgTitle').substr(mw.config.get('wgTitle').indexOf('/')+1)... which also looks right, first slash. Acch, this is going to require real debugging, isn't it? Wnt (talk) 21:36, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

But this is an interesting edit. Apparently the title was glitched at the time of creation! Not sure how that would affect the page title you were actually viewing though. Wnt (talk) 21:40, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

@Postdlf: A fix on April 5 is what got rid of the {{la|US}} template call. A bug in Template:Afd2 is blamed. I should note though that the original listing by @Jeh: was on April 1, as was the fix that left the la template untouched. An obscure mechanism requiring a steward to delete United States was the only thing that stopped this from being a really notable April Fools' prank, but I have to say bravo for a bold effort. :) Perhaps though Template:la can be modified to put a CSS box or something equally noticeable around the actual la template output, so that future Fools have to be equally inventive. Wnt (talk) 14:23, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: I assure you, no "April Fools" (or other) joke was intended. I had no idea of this script issue. As the replies to that AFD indicated it was a completely righteous AFD. (I suppose next you're going to accuse me of being a sockmaster for the account that created that article, just to set this up?) I naively thought the script could be used without issue; I've opened one or two AFDs before. After using it to create the AFD entry I realized that some of what it had created, including the AFD entry's title and I don't remember exactly what else now - indeed referred to /US and not the whole article title, so I tried to fix it. I guess I didn't get everything, or maybe I couldn't have done anything that would fix what would happen when the article was actually deleted? Either way, I tried. You know, non-joke edits do occur on April 1 - maybe you should try a little AGF? Since it's a little late for that, I request a retraction and an apology. Jeh (talk) 18:10, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, the other alternative is that God or the universe wants the United States deleted, and you and afd2 and closeAFD were merely the instruments of one of its pranks. I'll peg the odds at, oh, sixty-forty, not sure which way. (I don't deny it was a righteous AfD ... but finding a righteously deletable article with the right text after the slash would have been necessary for the April Fools joke, since the admin has to really delete something) Wnt (talk) 18:48, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Articles containing slashes in their name should be avoided, in my opinion. While they can be created, there are various scripts that do funny things to them. Using the 'move subpages' admin function can misfire, for example. EdJohnston (talk) 19:05, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

The slash character is primarily a legal, legitimate title character for legal, legitimate titles.
— brion, Bugzilla, 2006

--Pipetricker (talk) 21:30, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

When I think about it, if the afd2 script doesn't give you a good sense of what you're deleting, that is the bug. I mean, prank or no prank, other things like this could happen. I mean, any IP could add <span style="display:none;">{{la|Main Page}}</span> to an AfD he somehow guesses a steward will close, and my guess is... Wnt (talk) 02:53, 7 April 2016 (UTC) Main Page (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

That regex is looking for a pattern of {{la|...}}, where "..." is one or more characters. The [^\}]+ means any characters that aren't a closing curly brace. The square brackets mean a set of characters, the carat (^) means negation--that is, match any character that's *not* in the set--and the \} is the curly brace; curly braces are a special character in regex, so they have to be escaped with a backslash. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 02:58, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks - I actually did figure that out about halfway through there above as I was writing, thanks to w3schools' crib sheet, but it doesn't hurt to have a confirmation! Wnt (talk) 03:01, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Deleting module pages?

How does one go about getting module pages deleted? I created Module:Sandbox/AlexTheWhovian/sandbox to create my own module sandbox, per the instructions at Module:Sandbox, but decided to move/change it to Module:Sandbox/AlexTheWhovian. How do I go about getting the former page deleted? Twinkle gives me an error when I try, stating "Tagging page: Failed to save edit: The modification you tried to make was aborted by an extension hook". Alex|The|Whovian^? 07:38, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

@AlexTheWhovian: You poke an admin :) You can try tagging the talk page and hope the admin who deletes it is paying attention. Opabinia regalis (talk) 08:04, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Gotchya, thanks for that! Alex|The|Whovian^? 08:06, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Template:Service_award_progress

Resolved

 – Functionality included in template; issue solved. ~ Rob^Talk 15:39, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi! I'm wondering if someone who is more familiar with template syntax than I am could take a look at Template:Service_award_progress to add a gender-neutral option and default to the genderoverride parameter? Currently, it defaults to "he or she", which excludes non-binary editors. Thanks! :) Goldenshimmer (talk) 02:28, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Our XX male syndrome, XXYY syndrome, XYY syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome, and Turner syndrome articles all address the subjects as male or female, and XY sex-determination system doesn't address other disorders that produce individuals that are neither male nor female; unless these articles are missing something significant, there's no third option. Nyttend (talk) 03:28, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Our system prefs have gender neutral/he/she options that should be able to be leveraged. Though on things like this I'm usually just in favor of singular they. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:32, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@Goldenshimmer: I looked into it. The genderoverride parameter already allows any input. The documentation just sucks. I'm updating it now. ~ Rob^Talk 12:33, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: Ah, sweet, thanks! :) Goldenshimmer (talk) 18:02, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Format glitch

Right now, on Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard, {{archive top}} is at war with code found at the foot of Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard/Header, such that the closure message for Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Rory_Ridley-Duff is found at the foot of "Help answer requested edits" right-side table, and there's an acre of so of white space beneath #Rory_Ridley-Duff & Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Reward_Gateway. If this could be fettled, that would be appreciated. (All this on firefox on a mac, should it be a browser issue). thx. --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:35, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

You've got two right-floated objects. They will always stack up like that, it's working as per the CSS specs. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:48, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

I trust you were sucking your teeth as you wrote that, RR. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:07, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Utilizing template: Globalize within template: Multiple issues

I'm wondering whether it's possible to add a discussion functionality to the template within a template as I tried to do here. I'm proposing something like this: (Discuss). Is it less useful then because of the possibility of discussion on the talk page already being linked at the top of the main template?

24.52.247.20 (talk) 05:23, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

There is currently an RfC in progress discussing the addition of talk links to child templates of {{Multiple issues}} (talk). I would suggest joining that. fredgandt 06:34, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

RfC: Preferred protocol for external links

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § RfC: Preferred protocol for external links

 – Per user suggestion, with OP's blessing. ―Mandruss ☎ 19:06, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Can someone explain this edit summary

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AUser_pages%2FRfC_for_stale_drafts_policy_restructuring&type=revision&diff=714076759&oldid=714076626

And, no I did not copy that, no way. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 09:46, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Browsers can remember old edit summaries and suggest them if your current edit summary is a prefix of an old edit summary. In this edit the day before you had that edit summary. I guess your new edit at some point had a matching prefix (it would only require an initial slash) and you accidentally selected a suggested summary. It only requires a click or pressing enter. In case you don't know, the edit summary gets a linked arrow and grey text whenever it starts with /* ... */. Section edits automatically start with that prefilled in the box but it can also be entered manually. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:15, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I thought, all I am sure of is that it wasn't copied. Thanks again (for making me feel stupid that is!) --QEDK (T ☕ C) 19:08, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Cross-wiki login not happening

For the last week or two, I've noticed that, If I log in on this Wikipedia, I'm not logged in on sister projects; and vice versa. I am logged in on other Wikipedias. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:58, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: When this happens, it might be because some servers have still got records for old logins that should have been invalidated. There are two things that you could try: (i) use your browser's "remove individual cookies" feature (if it has one) to delete any cookie whose site includes the strings "mediawiki", "wikimedia" or "wikipedia"; (ii) log in as normal, then explicitly log out again using the "log out" link top right - this should force all login cookies to be invalidated. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:37, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikilink in note

Resolved

Hi, I am trying to get the link to Gold (Rhodes novel) to work in note [a] in the infobox of my Sandbox, in the same way as it works in article So Long, See You Tomorrow, any ideas ? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 18:36, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I think it's the unused pipe in [[Gold (Rhodes novel)|]]. Remove it or add the alternative text and it should work. Nthep (talk) 18:46, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 18:58, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, this was a case of Help:Pipe trick#Where it doesn't work. Many things don't work inside ref tags. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:31, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikisky.org down?

http://wikisky.org/

I knew this site may not be affiliated with Wikipedia. But since it gets used a lot here, I think it's worth to mention. --fireattack (talk) 03:21, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

@Fireattack: Nothing to do with us: the first clue is that on visiting that site, it does not resemble any of ours (in terms of sidebars, menus, tabs, etc.) and so does not use MediaWiki software. Next clue is that it uses frames, which is a horrible obsolete way of making information inaccessible. Third clue is that none of their pages mention the Wikimedia Foundation anywhere (all of ours do, at the very bottom - whatever your skin). Fourth: if you follow their "contact us" link bottom right, the page you reach also doesn't mention Wikimedia anywhere, and the address is in Ontario.

There are thousands of wikis, and by no means all are part of the Wikimedia Foundation. I suggest that you try http://server3.wikisky.org/contact_us.jsp --Redrose64 (talk) 08:25, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

@Redrose64:: Sorry I didn't make it clear. My point is not asking Wikipedia to fix that site. It's about if that site is dead for good, we should use other service for {{Sky}}.--fireattack (talk) 18:44, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

And I cannot visit that contact us link either. :D --fireattack (talk) 23:50, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Special:Linksearch only shows eight uses of http://wikisky.org/ but a lot of http://www.wikisky.org. Some of their pages were cached by Google 31 March: Google:cache:http://www.wikisky.org/starview?object=NGC+3109. So it worked four days ago. Maybe it's just a temporary problem. After writing that, a new test shows the site is working again! PrimeHunter (talk) 10:12, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Yeah it's mainly used by {{Sky}}. And it's still down here :( --fireattack (talk) 18:46, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

It has also gone down for me again. Let's call it currently unstable, and not something to start changing links for. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:17, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Yesterday, I tried http://wikisky.org/ twice at twelve-hour intervals, it worked both times. It now throws

Server not found

Firefox can't find the server at server7.wikisky.org.

    Check the address for typing errors such as ww.example.com instead of www.example.com
    If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
    If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

but http://www.wikisky.org still works. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:02, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

This site is still down here. --fireattack (talk) 06:29, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Interface editor

Resolved

 – In a true BOOMERANG fashion, I've blocked BasBibi per WP:NOTHERE. Just look at their first mainspace edit. Max Semenik (talk) 20:37, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Rights not yet. --BasBibi (talk) 15:35, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

?—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 15:36, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

You requested WP:Confirmed twice during your first four days here; you requested Rollback (on the wrong page) when your account was two days old[24], and you have several made requests about Sukhumi, including having it de-protected so that you could repeatedly add a link to a website that is being considered for the spam blacklist to it (User:Beetstra, do you want to take a look at that?), but I see no evidence that you have requested interface editor.

Special:CentralAuth/BasBibi shows that your account has only 80 (eighty) edits across all wikis and is blocked as a sockpuppet at the Russian Wikipedia. Even if you had requested this userright, I would expect your request to be immediately rejected. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:41, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Also, there's a request for extended-confirmed rights at Meta. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:54, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: The abuse seems to focus on one or two pages, of which at least one is semi-protected. If editors are only here to wait to become confirmed so they can continue the abuse, then that warrants, as happened here I think, an immediate block of the account (and might warrant temporary expansion to full protection). That being said, I get also inclined to add the site to the blacklist, but I am not convinced that that will stop the abuse more than the semi-protection (there is more being edited than only the external link, and the external link (well, nothing) can already not be added by unconfirmed and IP editors). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 05:03, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Date of the creating of Wikipedia

Hi ever1. Where I can find a dates of the creating of Wikipedias? For exempl: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaGrowthSummary.htm - date of the creating of Kurdish Wikipedia is Jun 2002. In return , the Francais Wikipedia (fr:Wikipédia_en_kurde) and otherlang Wikipedias take 7 Jan 2004 (without links). So where is true? — Green Zero обг 15:44, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

They weren't all created the same date. History of Wikipedia has a Timeline section. But if you go to the English wikipedia page of whichever one you have in mind, it should tell you in the infobox. For instance, French Wikipedia says it launched 23 March 2001. Spanish Wikipedia launched May 11, 2001. The first link you provided does not say it's the date the different languages were launched. It says those are the first edits. — Maile (talk) 19:51, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

• I'll add that the "first edit" is not actually the first edits. Many of the early edits were not saved by the software used in the early days of Wikipedia and are likely gone forever. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 05:24, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Add articles to watchlist from another user's contrib history?

Hi all, gnome admin here. Was curious if anyone had any clever script-y solution to an idea I have. (I pitched it at the Idea lab, but I think my pitch is causing confusion.)

Scenario:

• Let's say I just discovered a dude who I suspect of being a sock operator. This guy, for example.
• He's edited a bunch of articles recently, and I want to add a bunch of them to my own watchlist, so that after I block him, if he were to come back and re-edit those articles, it would be on my watchlist, and sockpuppetry would be easily caught.
• Currently, I have to go to each article and click the little star, or go into my raw watchlist and copy/paste. That's time consuming.
• I would benefit from a tool that would allow me to see what pages in his contrib history I already have watchlisted, and that would allow me to add articles to my watchlist directly from his contrib history.

Can such madness be done?

I do, of course, see the possibility that this tool could be used for on-site harassment, so I'm thinking that it might best be created as an admin tool for now. Thoughts? Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 03:51, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

It could be done by a tool but you could do it with minimal editing, by grabbing a list of the user's contributions, and then editing your raw watchlist using Special:EditWatchlist/raw - there's a link at the top of your watchist page. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:56, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi. I would enjoy making a User script to make this easily possible for you. I can start right away, but might not get it done before I slip off the the land of Nod. I'm loathed to work on it if

1. You wouldn't want it
2. Someone else is gonna beat me to it

Shall I go ahead? fredgandt 04:05, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

You could use AWB. Make a list with user contribs as the source, copy the list and paste it into your raw watchlist. Melonkelon (talk) 04:39, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: - I've got most of the way done with watchUserContribs.js, which you can use by adding mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Fred_Gandt/watchUserContribs.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' ); or simply importScript( 'User:Fred_Gandt/watchUserContribs.js' ); if you're a rebel, to your common JavaScript page.

All that's left to do is marking the listed contribs respectfully depending on if you're watching them, and do some tests, but the basics seem to work okay (use at own risk).

It may not be a built in tool, but it at least gives an impression of whether such a feature can be useful, and thus is at least a place to start. fredgandt 05:24, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Fred Gandt, cool man, thanks! I'll install this in a bit and see how it goes! Many thanks! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 07:54, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

No problem. It'll have some kind of marking for the pages that are currently on your watchlist either later or tomorrow (just got back from walking the dog, need food then sleep). Other than that, I don't have any alterations planned, but if there's anything specific you'd suggest changing (or it fails), message me. fredgandt 09:48, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

As far as my limited testing reveals, it's good to go. It should be pretty efficient although can be tweaked to utilise sessionStorage if needed. The checkboxes will be outlined in blue if the page is on your watchlist. I didn't add a one click per page option as the extra code and HTML seems kinda pointless to save one click; if you want to un/watch just one page, check its box and click the appropriate option button (top and bottom of the list). The de/select all checkbox (top and bottom) works as expected. API calls are minimised by submitting only unique pages and by omitting talk titles, so don't worry about selecting multiple instances of the same page.

Due to the great variety of Wikipedia, I wouldn't be surprised if you see things I haven't accounted for; if there are any problems, please let me know so I can fix them. If it fails outright, please check your browser's console ( Ctrl+⇧ Shift+i in Chrome ) for errors before messaging me. fredgandt 11:57, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Wales/Awaken the Dragon

Hi, I was wondering if somebody here could generate a list of the 100 most visited articles on wikipedia for Wales, the most recent figure? I don't know if wikidata has that ability and you can autogenerate a list, but I need a list of the most visited as I'm considering placing new points on them. I was also wondering if somebody could create a list of articles listed within Wikipedia:WikiProject Wales/Awaken the Dragon/Core articles which have any tag slopped on them. Thanks.♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:36, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

"Answer" to first question: request it here. The result will be something like this. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:46, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

And to second: Petscan with such settings shows, that there are no clean-up tags in those articles. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:58, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Cheers Edgar.♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:41, 10 April 2016 (UTC) @Edgars2007: Had no luck with generating the Welsh list. Can you or somebody do it and post in Wikipedia:WikiProject Wales/Popular pages? Perhaps a list of the 250 most popular ones.♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:50, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Where's the new pageview tool

Grok.se is down, I remember going onto a new site, can't remember now. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 20:47, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews. Page histories link to it. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:59, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Page information and robots.txt

When using the "page information" link at the side of the page, it says indexing is allowed on pages where indexing is disallowed according to robots.txt. It looks like robots.txt is working correctly (pages don't appear in search results, or are listed with no description), but page information (action=info) is not reporting this. Has this already been reported? Peter James (talk) 23:13, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

"Page information" is made by MediaWiki and only says whether the page itself has the noindex HTML tag. See Wikipedia:Controlling search engine indexing. Our robots.txt at https://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt is not a MediaWiki file and has no influence on the indexing field at "Page information". PrimeHunter (talk) 23:29, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

uselang=qqx shows the currently blank MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header is displayed at top of "Page information". We could link to Help:Page information but I would prefer a more developed help page before doing that. It doesn't currently mention what "Indexing by robots" means. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:42, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

The robots.txt page itself is not a MediaWiki page but part of it comes from MediaWiki:Robots.txt. Peter James (talk) 23:52, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

DumbBot is causing problems

User:DumbBOT is malfunctioning and creating a bunch of useless categories like this one. It was speedy deleted, and then DumbBot made it again. There is a old consensus that these categories should no longer be used and shouldn't be created in the first place, mangled or not. Dumbbot's maintainer has been inactive for some time, and now there is another set of categories it needs to stop making.

Big question is:

1. Do we need to block this bot?
2. Can other bot makers create a replacement if we do?

Oiyarbepsy (talk) 00:20, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Strike that, looks like this is already being discussed at Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard#Incorrect category creations Oiyarbepsy (talk) 00:23, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Possible page creation bug

Hi. Using Google Chrome on Windows 7.

In order to test something I created User:Fred Gandt/test "test" test and although the creation was successful, something peculiar happened.

1. I navigated to the non existent page.
2. I clicked "Create".
3. I added some text and a summary.
4. I clicked Save page.

EXPECTED: To see the page I just created.

OBSERVED: The default "This page doesn't exist, but you can create it..." GUI that showed at step 1 - as if the creation had failed, or never been attempted.

1. I opened a new tab showing my contribs, and saw the creation entry.
2. I went back to the page creation tab and refreshed.

OBSERVED: The created page as expected after step 4.

1. I tried creating more subpages with quotes.

OBSERVED: Everything worked as expected.

Was this a temporary glitch, or a bug? Has anyone else seen this? fredgandt 16:52, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Your browser had probably cached the url before the page was created. If you create a page by clicking a red link then the url has another form and the page url doesn't get cached. I don't know how you created the page but the search box has a special feature for userspace where it goes to the url a page would have if it already existed. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:59, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't think that was the issue, as I've never seen this happen before when following the same procedure(s). fredgandt 18:07, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

When I save an edit to an existing page, I sometimes get the former version until I refresh. I haven't observed a system in when it happens but assume it's just browser caching. Don't expect everything to behave identical every time. You didn't say how you created the page and I haven't found a message that says "This page doesn't exist, but you can create it..." Do you have "en - English" as language at Special:Preferences? Did the message really say that? What did you do before clicking "Create", e.g. edit the url directly, enter the title in the search box, click a red link. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:32, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

"Hume teaches us ... " - Ghost - Enter the Matrix.

The exact wording of the create page page is "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for [title] in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings." -_-

I navigated to the page to create by typing the URL directly into Chrome's Omnibar/box.

I can't recall ever (apart from this anomaly, thus the post) getting the former version of an edited page. Caching here just doesn't shouldn't work fail that way. I think there may be something wrong with your browser. fredgandt 18:51, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I assume you are now quoting an example from mainspace and not userspace where you created the reported example. It's rare I get the old version after saving an edit to an existing page but I have seen many others say it happened to them. And people using the the new section tab on discussion pages sometimes double post, presumably because they didn't see it saved the first time. Your method to create the page means you viewed the url before so it becomes possible for your browser to cache the page. I haven't tried it on page creation or heard reports about it but pages are usually created via red links where the possibility doesn't occur due to different url's. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:38, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I've seen it before; it's browser caching; WP:BYPASS always fixes it. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:34, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, I suppose there's a first time for everything. fredgandt 03:02, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Server migration will prevent editing next week

Read all about it, in case you didn't see the note at the top of your watchlist.  ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:39, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-15

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

Recent changes

• The visual editor can generate wikicode with image options in your language. Examples of image options are "thumb" or "left". You can ask to change to options in your language in Phabricator. [25][26]
• Wiktionaries and Wikisources can now use the visual editor. It is an opt-in beta feature. It still needs development to work better with these projects. [27][28]
• ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [29]
• The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [30]

Problems

• There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [31]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
• The wikipedia.org portal will get many small bug fixes and improvements. Most will be for the search box and suggested results that were added in March. [32]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are improving transclusion of templates for Parsoid and balanced templates. The meeting will be on 13 April at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [33]

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

20:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Changing a user talk page from one archiving method to another

An editor who had ClueBot III archiving their talk page wanted automatic archiving to start up again (since ClueBot III seems to be on the fritz). Their archive-bot was changed over to lowercase sigmabot III. Well, sigmabot worked (yay!) but links to the newly-archived content are not visible on the main talk page (plus the new pages have no "search" box etc). The talk page is User talk:Chicbyaccident, there has been some ancillary discussion at sigmabot's creator's talk page but I would like any further discussion to take place here. I am thinking that unless ClueBot III starts working again that there will be other users/pages that will need to be converted to lowercase sigmabot or other possible archive-bots so this is something I could come across in the future. Anyone know of something that would work? The archiving is fine but there are no visible links to the newly-archived content. Another editor mentioned that a Lua module could be created but I am wondering if there is some answer already within WP's many pages. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 17:53, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

It's because there is nothing to update User:ClueBot III/Indices/User talk:Chicbyaccident. If the editor wants to display the archives of his talk page, he needs to change that page. --Izno (talk) 18:02, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Another way to handle it automatically would be to {{Special:Prefixindex/User talk:Chicbyaccident/Archives/|stripprefix=1}}. This will not be so pretty in that it will not be ordered by month (it will be ordered by year then month name) but will not require user maintenance. --Izno (talk) 18:05, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Many thanks for your reply, but I admit it, I am not a coder, I just try to help out a little bit here and there. When I have placed archive boxes on talk pages in other situations, all that is handled automatically. Is there any way you could demonstrate what you mean? If this type of situation comes up again - if archive-bots stop working and users want to convert to another bot - I would like to know how to fix the situation myself but you would have to go step by step so I can understand. Shearonink (talk) 18:28, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Thx for posting that code. I tried out "Special:Prefix..." code in Preview, it did place links on the user talk page (and, btw, Year/Month is the way the archiving was originally set up so that's fine). But is there any way to leave ClueBot's Archive box on the user page but then institute a new "active" Archive box for sigmabot? Earlier today lowercase sigmabot III created archive pages [34] for User talk:Chicbyaccident/Archives/2015/December & User talk:Chicbyaccident/Archives/2016/January. It would be nice to be able to search those archived pages by using an archive box/template. I am more familiar with how sigmabot works but have no idea if it is possible to have both an inactive archive box and an active archive box on the same page, or if it is possible to merge the ClueBot & sigmabot content together. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 21:34, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Archive boxes like {{archivebox}} don't care which bot does the archiving, or even if it's done manually. What you should be aiming for is that in changing from one bot to the other, the name of the archive pages should follow the same pattern - that is, if one bot archives to pages named Talk:Foo/archive 1, the other bot must do the same - and not use pagenames like Talk:Foo/Archive 1. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:12, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

The previously-established nomenclature for the archived-pages titles has been followed in the changeover from ClueBot III to lowercase sigmabot III. The old pages were called "User talk:Chicbyaccident/Archives/2015/July" etc., the new pages are called "User talk:Chicbyaccident/Archives/2016/January" etc - so that's all good. And the new bot archived the old content here. But, the links to the archived content are not visible on the user talk page. I'm not a coder, I don't understand the *why*. If I understand the why maybe I will then be able to "get" the How. I want to understand what is possible to do if I come across this issue again so I can fix it myself next time.. So, I need all you smart tech-folks to explain to a smart non-coder a few things and maybe explain it step by step.

So, can someone please explain to me:

1) Why links to the newly-archived content are not showing up on the user talk-page and

2) How to possibly make links to the newly-archived content be visible.

I did try the "special:Prefix" method that Izno mentioned above and that does place links on the user page and even through Izno said that there was nothing to update "User:ClueBot III/Indices/User talk:Chicbyaccident" I don't quite understand what that means. I don't understand why the archive box now on the page isn't displaying the new bot's content. I really don't. I know the regular denizens of this Village Pump page are probably saying "How can you NOT see what is wrong with the archiving?!" but you have to remember I am pretty much a techno-illiterate and the last coding course I took was Basic, waaaaay back before the dawn of WP...

Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 00:21, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I've just added {{MonthlyArchive}}, which adds all the links, but perhaps the formatting needs improvement ... feel free to tweak it. Graham87 06:59, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I think *that* is pretty much what I was looking for. I am going to save this on my "page of useful links". Thank you for putting me out of my misery. Shearonink (talk) 08:31, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Infobox query

Resolved

Hi, Just trying to work out where the 'novel' genre is coming from in the book infobox in article After the Fire, A Still Small Voice as I cannot see it in the code... Any ideas ? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 20:51, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

It's being fetched as a default from WikiData. fredgandt 20:59, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

What will they think of next ! GrahamHardy (talk) 08:33, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

'Compare selected revisions' query

Is there a way of comparing two revisions within the history of an article? With each other, not the current one? Apologies if the answer is blindingly obvious! (And, also, if this is ot the correct arena to ask in) _Fortuna ^{Imperatrix Mundi} 11:24, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Click the left radio button at the old revison and the right at the new revision in the page history. See more at Help:Page history. Wikipedia:Help desk is a better place for help questions. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:33, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

That'll probably do, cheers PrimeHunter _Fortuna ^{Imperatrix Mundi} 11:35, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

adding a row count column to a sortable table

In this article:

List of current NCAA Division I women's basketball coaches

there is a table, not a simple table, but a table created by the conjoining of several templates. Despite the fact that it has multiple templates, the overall table is sortable.

I would like to have an additional column at the beginning containing the numbers one through 349. As an example of how this would be useful, if you sort by the “first season”column, (click twice, so that the most recent season is at the top) it is useful to keep track of how many coaches are in their first season. At the moment, I have to manually count the rows or copy into an Excel spreadsheet and create a counting column. It would be much easier if there were an initial column with the row count.

While I am particularly interested in this table, I can also imagine that there are other sortable tables and Wikipedia in which one might be interested in a row count column. I don’t see an easy way to do this.

One possibility is to create a single column table just to the left of this existing table but I don’t quite know how to do that. Any ideas?--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:21, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I made Template:Wbb coaches/America East Conference/sandbox which uses Template:Coach list header/sandbox and Template:Coach list entry/sandbox.

Is this in any way useful? fredgandt 17:05, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you want the numbers to stay still when the rest of the data is sorted? 'Cause that (above) won't work then. fredgandt 17:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Most probably issue is related to this one. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:58, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

In short - yes, this currently can't be done. - "can't" is a rude word IMO Where there's a will, there's a way. However, until Sphilbrick answers my question, I have no idea if the problem is already solved (and will be asleep soon).

{{Table row counter}} might work if its module expanded the templates (which I'm pretty sure Lua can do). fredgandt 18:11, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

@Fred Gandt: Thanks for the quick response Fred. Your sandbox is in sortable but it looks to me if you made it sortable that when sorting the index numbers would sort, which defeats the purpose. After sorting, I still want the leftmost column to start with 1.--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:38, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

CSS counters could do it  fredgandt 18:43, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

yes, the discussion at “how do I disable sorting for only one column” is relevant. I do know how to make a column so it’s not sortable but as discussed there, that’s not the point.

I do see in Help:Table#Non-rectangular_tables an example where it to tables line up side-by-side (ignore the solid/liquid/gas table and look at the three tables below). So I wondered if I could set up a one column table to the left and then the main table to the right but I don’t quite see how to do that. I presume if they are two separate tables sorting the rightmost table won’t sort the leftmost table.

Another possibility but I don’t know how to do it is to accept that the first column gets sorted but instead of containing hardcoded numbers it would contain something like # which would be converted to sequential numbers but of course I tried that and it doesn’t work that simply, but I wondered if there was something along this line that would allow the cells to be sorted and then filled in with numbers one through 349 after the sorting.--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:46, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Working solution at User:Fred Gandt/sandbox#Slate but to see it working, you'll need to add the CSS to your browser manually. If someone like Edokter fancied adding it to MediaWiki:Common.css (with a less egotistical name of course), then Bob is officially your uncle. fredgandt 19:09, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Nice concept, but that CSS is very inflexible and only with for the first column. So not very suitable as a generic solution without a lot work. How popular would such a feature be? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 19:25, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I've seen row numbers in a number of places. StackOverflow has some interesting CSS. --Izno (talk) 19:51, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Table width is critical, not only for mobile. The example is still okay, no problem with another column. –Be..anyone (talk) 19:35, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Edokter - I have no idea how popular the option would be, but for little extra code, it would seem at least useful on occasions. I wonder if the class could fake the extra column so it didn't have to physically exist?

Sphilbrick - Editing the table and adding hard coded numbers is cheating! I'm afraid you need to have the CSS to see the magic. If you add that code in my sandbox to your common.css, you'll see the table example how it's supposed to be (as long as you don't edit it again in the interim ;-) fredgandt 19:49, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I thought maybe you just omitted the numbers, I am now guessing that if I installed the CSS I would see the numbers. But if I understand correctly, no one else would. That kinda defeats the purpose, as I want this so that everyone can see the numbers.--S Philbrick(Talk) 19:56, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

That's why I called in Edokter (he's a wizz if ever a wizz there was), since the CSS would need to be a global class for all Wikipedia users by it being added to the site's common.css. You can see the example working if you add that code to your own common.css, and if the code were added to the site's common.css, then everyone would see the numbers. fredgandt 20:06, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

• In List of French mountains by prominence, suppose you’re interested in how many of these mountains were in the Alps. Trivial to sort by the range, but then you have to manually count. Suppose you are interested in the number of mountains with the prominence under 1200 m. Again sort by prominence but now you have to count. If the first column were not a sorted rank but a static one through 37, you could see the count trivially.
• In List of museums in Cheshire, suppose you’re interested in knowing how many of these museums were historic houses. Currently you can sort by type and count the rows, but if there were a static count column you could take the difference between the last in the first and quickly see how many qualified.

• In Fishing_industry_by_country#Fish.2C_crustaceans.2C_molluscs.2C_etc suppose you’re interested in how many countries have a capture tonnage of more than 1 million.

• In List of museums in Lincolnshire, suppose you’re interested in how many museums were in each region. You can sort by region but you have to manually count or move to an Excel file. With a static count column it’s relatively easy to do the counting.

• In List of the most populous counties by U.S. state suppose you cared about the number of counties with over or under 1 million population.

I think I could supply a few hundred such examples.--S Philbrick(Talk) 19:53, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

• There is bug T42618, and solution proposal provided by Matma Rex, which is successfully implemented in plwiki. See for example this table. Paweł Ziemian (talk) 21:01, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that "bug" (really, feature enhancement request) is exactly what I want, and I do see that it is enabled in plwiki. I read the whole string - but I am unclear as to the stayus in enwicki - it seems to be stalled. Is there anything I can do to push it along?--S Philbrick(Talk) 12:44, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

CSVLoader

Hi, is there any why to create articles with Wikipedia:CSVLoader if article name contains a comma (,)?--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 13:58, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Putting article name in quotes doesn't help? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:29, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

No--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 14:36, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia:CSVLoader#History states "1.0.0.3 - Added ability to use custom separators (for example, tilde). This will be needed when the CSV data contains "comma" characters." - so somewhere there may be an option to work around this. fredgandt 16:04, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Most formats of CSV add (double) quotation marks when a comma appears: ABC, "ABC,DEF", and etc. --Izno (talk) 17:25, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

But as ԱշոտՏՆՂ already answered, this doesn't help this time. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:59, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks you ^_^! I didn't notice the Field separator option (File:CSVLoader_20110830.png) it works when we change default comma (,) to other character.--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 13:23, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Talk:Jethro Tull (band)

Talk:Jethro Tull (band) has an error, "Expression error: Missing operand for >." I've looked but haven't found the cause, maybe someone here can have a look. Thanx, Mlpearc (open channel) 15:46, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Its coming from the template {{Archive basics}} but I can't place why it is (no other page that uses that template seems to have a problem). --MASEM (t) 16:00, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Fixed. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:07, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanx all. Mlpearc (open channel) 16:29, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

The specific problem was that |maxsize= was present but blank. {{archive basics}} expects a value - if you don't have one, the param needs to be omitted entirely. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:50, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikimedia sites intermittently not responding

Over the last hour and 20 mins I have had a lot of trouble getting responses from Wikimedia sites. Is this a global problem or a problem near my end? My ISP is Slingshot in New Zealand. Nurg (talk) 09:36, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I had a brief problem accessing labs - not sure if it is related, but cleared up now.--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:23, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

It came right for a while but starting about 12 mins ago I couldn't access for a while. Have just got back in now. Nurg (talk) 09:42, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

The problem has been confirmed by another editor in New Zealand who has a different ISP from me - see Wikipedia:New Zealand Wikipedians' notice board#Intermittent access problems to WP. I suspect it is some sort of regional access problem, as has happened a few times in the past, otherwise lots of other people would be affected. When it occurs, it stops my access to WP and Wikivoyage. How do we get this addressed by tech staff?

Here's my trace route to en.wikipedia.org [198.35.26.96]:

 1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
 2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 3    11 ms    11 ms    11 ms  ae-5-10.cpcak3-r2.tranzpeer.net [101.98.3.41]
 4    10 ms    11 ms    10 ms  ae-4-10.cpcak3-r2.tranzpeer.net [101.98.3.40]
 5    11 ms    11 ms    10 ms  pts-n.cpcak4-r1.tranzpeer.net [101.98.5.20]
 6    12 ms    11 ms    12 ms  pts-s.cpcak4-r1.tranzpeer.net [101.98.5.21]
 7     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 9     *        *        *     Request timed out.
10     *        *        *     Request timed out.
11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
14   146 ms   147 ms   146 ms  text-lb.ulsfo.wikimedia.org [198.35.26.96]

thanks, Nurg (talk) 10:19, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

A past regional problem was doc'd at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 119#geoiplookup.wikimedia.org. @Ryan lane: fixed that. Nurg (talk) 10:56, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I've pinged Ops, who are fabulous about fixing these problems. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

This does sound like a regional issue -- this does happen from time to time and it's usually some a fault on some regional ISP's end. Once we are made aware of such issues, we can often redirect traffic to go via another route, or at least inform that particular ISP NOC-to-NOC. Unfortunately (or fortunately!), for reasons completely unrelated to this issue which I was just made aware, we've made some routing changes at approximately 16:00 UTC today, April 12th, that would have probably alleviated your issues or at least changed the situation drastically. The change was draining our San Francisco/ulsfo site, and redirecting their traffic to Ashburn/eqiad & Dallas/codfw, which have different routing than the one you were experiencing. It would be helpful for us if you could let us know if you're experiencing issues right now (another traceroute would help). Even if it works now, those issues may reappear once we put San Francisco back in service (this drainage is a temporary situation, due to maintenance), after which we may have to troubleshoot this again. Let us know in any case :) (WMF TechOps) Faidon Liambotis (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Need expert help to fix: Huge amount of white space (from 2012 edit)

Greetings, While viewing page Category:Wikipedia articles needing factual verification I noticed a huge amount of white space before the subcategory listings. This is way beyond anything I would be able to fix, so I'm asking for help here. At View history it looks like this revision caused the problem. Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk) 14:05, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

FWIW, I don't know exactly what's wrong but it is something from {{Parent monthly clean-up category}} that affects all category pages that use it. The white space is generated by the list of monthly entries before it is hidden, but the text doesn't move up to fill in the empty space as one would expect. --MASEM (t) 14:10, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

No idea either. If you preview the category it looks fine — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:18, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

As far as I can tell in my browser (Opera), the {{Parent monthly clean-up category}} starts out expanded, forcing the category listings down; afterwards, the box contracts, butt the listings stay where they were originally. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:22, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Seems like a WebKit / Blink bug. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:26, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it's a browser inconsistency. The {{Parent monthly clean up category}} template encloses many links, one per line, making it very tall, so that in its uncollapsed state it forces page content downwards by a large distance. This template starts out uncollapsed, and collapses soon after all the JavaScript on the page starts to run. The actual problem is that upon collapsing, the content that previously it had forced down isn't moved up into the gap by all browsers. The most satisfactory solution would be to find sources for those unsourced claims - they go back to April 2007. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:41, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I see it renders correctly in IE-11 browser, but not on my "Chromium" browser. Recently I fixed a white-space issue at Wikipedia:Community portal by moving content template up into the base Community bulletin board template. Wonder if something like that might work here? Or is it just too complicate an issue? — JoeHebda • (talk) 16:12, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Redrose64 – After some more investigating, I wonder if that vertical template ({{Parent monthly clean up category}}) could be replaced with a horizontal template of years. I did find {{Cat topic year}} and asking if it could be used here? Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk) 19:58, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

The main problem there is that {{Parent monthly clean up category}} doesn't have one link per year, it's one per month. But altering the appearance of that cat will be controversial: the thing is, it's just one category out of a whole series, see Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month, which should basically be laid out in the same way. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:06, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• Guilty - but the place to "fix" this in the way described is mostly at "{{Progress box}}". Ideally this moving stuff around post render would be fixed instead. I've lost count of the number of times I have clicked in the edit box, only to have the page render the standard warning, move everything down and click me through to the copyright page.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:00, 12 April 2016 (UTC).

Database error

When attempting to save an edit to Talk:Lea Thompson, I'm getting error messages as follows:

Database error
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software.

    Function: WikiPage::lockAndGetLatest
    Error: 1205 Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction (10.64.32.22)

It's happened three times; I know what it means: but I can't fix it, not being a sysadmin. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:31, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Works here. I had "our servers are all having a picnic" message today. Perhaps this is another manifestation of that. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:48, 12 April 2016 (UTC).

I had a similar error when moving over an existing page trying to do a history merge. But no damage seems to have occurred. The software must have rolled back any partially performed functions. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:04, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

IP addresses and spam blacklist

If I understand the first regex of MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist, \b^\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\b, it is supposed to prevent links by IP address. So why are users still able to insert a link like http://74.125.206.100/spam and the blacklist does not prevent it? Dalba 16:19, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I tested this on a test wiki and after removing the ^ anchor the regex works as I expected. Dalba 16:58, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

This has been the case pretty much since the line was added to the blacklist. I agree: it can surely never match anything, because you can't have a word boundary (\b) before the beginning of a string (^). I think the ^ needs removing: indeed, the extension documentation suggests it's useless in every case. I think (?<=//)\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\b is what is actually intended, but I'm by no means an expert. Relentlessly (talk) 17:37, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Pinging Reaper Eternal and MER-C — JJMC89 (T·C) 17:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

The current documentation is from [35] which refers to phab:T66541. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:10, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Adjusted to (?<=//)\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\b. MER-C 06:28, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

@MER-C: I've reverted your change as it is preventing certain users (including me) IP addresses from being saved (see these edits for example [36] [37]). Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 10:54, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

It couldn't be saved because {{IPvandal}} calls {{User-multi}} with a http parameter. It causes Module:UserLinks to make a http:// link to the IP address in Module:UserLinks/extra. If we want IP addresses blacklisted then this must be changed. Maybe the module could add a dummy query parameter, and the blacklist regex be designed to allow IP links with such a parameter. I don't know whether IP adresses in external links is a widespread problem. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:21, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

IP addresses are a problem, as the domain always corresponds with an IP (or sometimes more), and a blacklist on the domain can then be immediately circumvented by using the corresponding IP. There are hardly any cases that I can imagine that we NEED to link to an IP as reasonable webpages always have a normal domainname (and there is always the whitelist).

Now I think of it .. this might bring down report saving on COIBot .. :-(. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 12:23, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Strange burst of activity at Special:Log/rights

A large number of suddenly been "promoted" (the term used) with additional tools. Has a bot gone nuts or something? Irondome (talk) 23:29, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

It looks like autoconfirmed has been renamed to extendedconfirmed for some reason, which makes no sense.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 23:45, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Apparently something to do with this and this. fredgandt 23:48, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

This is from phab:T126607, it's entirely expected. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:50, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Ok yeah. It's to do with the recent ARBPIA 30 days and 500 edits threshold for allowability of editing those subject areas. Irondome (talk) 23:55, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

• For some background on this, see WP:Extendedconfirmed, this updated section of the protection policy, and this village pump thread. In a nutshell, once an editor reaches 500 edits and 30 days tenure, they are automatically promoted into the "extendedconfirmed" user group, which allows them to edit pages protected by the new arbitration 30/500 article protection level. Mz7 (talk) 00:06, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• We ought to keep this out of the user rights log, it'll be a far too common event. Kharkiv07 (T) 00:12, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. Mz7 (talk) 00:19, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

It is a new autopromotion rule affecting the most active users, so the initial rate is probably going to be the peak, and over the course of the next week or so it should drop. We might be able to add a filter to the rights log like was done for the deletion log recently (I believe it reached the English Wikipedia last week). If such a feature were coded and merged into MediaWiki core now you might find the rate to be much better by the time it gets deployed. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 00:44, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• Not sure what's going on but I've apparently gained "extendedconfirmed" rights..... –Davey2010^Talk 00:34, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
• Ah probably should've read the above first!, Would've been nice if we were all informed first seeing as I'm assuming most of us had no idea about this new rights thingy.... –Davey2010^Talk 00:37, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes you have been "promoted". Exactly the language that the move was attempting to avoid, in the village pump discussion thread on it. Two issues. It will overload the log, as mentioned above, and such a term as promoted will give some newbies grounds for confusion, and probable behavioural issues based on flawed ideas of "promotion" if they edit in those areas and get into conflict.as this seems to be intimating. Irondome (talk) 00:41, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Did you raise these issues in that discussion thread? --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 00:47, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

How could I when I was not even aware of the discussion? Irondome (talk) 00:51, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, I too was unaware of this discussion until my watchlist became completely flooded with these promotions. I'm active on Wikipedia's meta parts every day.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 00:57, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• A comment and a question:
  • Comment: people can check to make sure this new protection level isn't being used in non-ArbCom-approved ways here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AProtectedPages&namespace=&type=edit&level=extendedconfirmed&sizetype=min&size=
  • Question: Where is the MediaWiki page used in the admin's page protection form? It's calling it "Established Editors and Administrators" there. Also calls it "established editor protected" in the table in the link above.

--Floquenbeam (talk) 01:06, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• You can almost always add &uselang=qqx to the URL to find that info. In this case you are looking for MediaWiki:Protect-level-extendedconfirmed. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 01:09, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• Odd, it isn't in [38]. But thanks, that's what I was looking for. --Floquenbeam (talk) 01:18, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• Pretty sure only existing local override pages are listed there. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 01:20, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• Yeah, it said there was no local page, so I just created it, and now it's there. Thanks. My first MediaWiki-space edit ever, at least that I can recall. And the wiki appears not to have broken. --Floquenbeam (talk) 01:23, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

  @Floquenbeam: Special:PrefixIndex only lists pages that exist locally, but Special:AllMessages also shows those that are recognised but not yet created - go to this list and try the "Filter by customization state" radio button. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:48, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• You might also be interested in MediaWiki:group-extendedconfirmed, MediaWiki:group-extendedconfirmed-member, MediaWiki:grouppage-extendedconfirmed, MediaWiki:right-extendedconfirmed, and MediaWiki:restriction-level-extendedconfirmed. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 01:16, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Eeesh. Well, it would've been better not to light up everyone's watchlists with "automatically promoted" after we deliberately used a nice neutral bland-sounding name for this thing... but it's good that this is moving forward. Does anyone know/can anyone check whether admins can remove the extendedconfirmed usergroup after it's been automatically assigned? I tested it on my sock, but it's short of 500 edits so I had to assign the right first. Opabinia regalis (talk) 01:33, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Special:ListGroupRights shows that admins are able to remove the right. Also the autopromote-once system should detect that they've done this and not automatically re-grant it on their next edit. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 01:46, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, thanks Krenair; I can never remember where to find that stuff. Opabinia regalis (talk) 01:50, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I've asked an editor who just got it and appears active if she minds being a guinea pig. --Floquenbeam (talk) 01:44, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

OR, I just confirmed that removing the right from someone who got it automatically doesn't get overridden with their next edit. Thanks to Nikkimaria for volunteering to be the guinea pig. --Floquenbeam (talk) 02:11, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Good to know, thank you both for testing! Opabinia regalis (talk) 05:07, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

We need to change the editnotice when people not meeting the level try to edit. Kharkiv07 (T) 01:41, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Poco a poco. The page hasn't even been protected with the new right yet. --Floquenbeam (talk) 01:44, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes sysops can manually add or revoke the permission. What hasn't been well tested is that if it stays revoked, the phab ticket suggested it would (as it uses a "promote once" type of scheme). — xaosflux ^Talk 01:49, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Can this new level of protection be added to Twinkle? I didn't see it listed right now. That tool is usually how I protect pages. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 15:31, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Looks like that's possible by an admin editing MediaWiki:Gadget-twinkleprotect.js. Take a look at how the custom templateeditor protection is dealt with there. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:46, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Moved from #New protection level:

• I don't know if this is the right thread/subthread, but why must every single user on my Watchlist show up with the extendedconfirmed confirmation? Is there a way to keep this off of watchlists? I can't read my watchlist for all of these extendedconfirmed confirmations. Softlavender (talk) 09:49, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

  I don't know, but it's a good way of finding out whose talk pages you're still watching after having posted a message three years ago, long since actioned, replied and archived, so no need to watch any more. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:55, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

  This is mentioned higher up - but the short answer is no this can't be suppressed - it only occurs on edit so expect the rate of it occurring to fall off rapidly. You may want to temporarily use the watchlist filters to check namespaces you are interested in if there are a lot on your list (e.g. article/wikipedia). — xaosflux ^Talk 11:23, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Promoted verbiage

I boldly changed the interface message from promoted to updated at MediaWiki:Rightslogentry-autopromote and MediaWiki:Logentry-rights-autopromote. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:23, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Wise edit! Irondome (talk) 02:25, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! This should finally dissociate the new user group from fancy styles like "promoted" and "established". Mz7 (talk) 02:33, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Don't see why "changed group membership" could not have been used. Compare the entries after the changes began with those from earlier, particularly that of 02:20, 5 April 2016. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:22, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Statistics

Might be interesting to keep an eye on Special:Statistics - there are currently ~1650 users in this group - tracking this will be able to provide a real time count of how many registered established seasoned editors are around for a bit. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:38, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Is this right only being given when eligible editors make an edit? Sam Walton (talk) 11:06, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that is the trigger for processing. FYI we are now at just shy of 3000. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:12, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Now 11,473. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:43, 12 April 2016 (UTC).

Dynamic version: 70,059 thanks MSGJ. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:48, 13 April 2016 (UTC).

New protection level

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T131976

A few things:

• I asked about updating {{pp}} at Template talk:Pp#Extended confirmed protection if anyone is interested. Currently we're using a cheaply written {{pp-30-500}} on pages with editing restrictions enforced by Special:AbuseFilter/698.
• See Killings and massacres during the 1948 Palestine war for an example of a page using this new level of protection. It adds a pink background to the source window, like it does for template and fully-protected pages. Do we really want that? It's true you should "edit with caution" on these controversial topics, but that's more regarding behaviour than some technical aspect like editing interface pages

I'm going to hold off on protecting more of the affected pages until we get this ironed out — MusikAnimal ^talk 05:02, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

No, we do not want this. Red background basically says "Do not edit!", whereas in this case we have just extended semi, when established editors are perfectly welcome to edit the article.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:40, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Agreed with YMB regarding the pink background. --Izno (talk) 12:50, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Let's get rid of it, then. I see the mw-textarea-protected CSS class is being added, which leads me to believe it's a site configuration. I've asked at phab:T126607 — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:07, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

A question about the protection message

Is there any reason why the protection banner on the new extended confirmed protected pages say WARNING: This page has been protected so that only users with extended confirmed rights can make edits. See Wikipedia:Protection policy#Arbitration 30/500 protection. This seems offputting, especially with ALL CAPS and the WARNING on it.

Can we have a more friendly message, similar to the semi-protection message? Note: This page has been semi-protected so that only autoconfirmed users can edit it. If you need any help getting started with editing, see the New contributors' help page. Except replace "semi" with "extended", "autoconfirmed" with "extended confirmed", and "New contributors' help page" with "Wikipedia:Protection policy#Arbitration 30/500 protection" (updating the links accordingly).

Right now, the WARNING!!! sign seems a little too scary for normal editing. epicgenius @ 14:41, 6 April 2016 (UTC) (talk) 14:41, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Extended confirmed uses MediaWiki:Protectedpagewarning like all other protection levels except semi-protected which uses MediaWiki:Semiprotectedpagewarning. MediaWiki:Protectedpagewarning has said "WARNING" most of the time since 2003. It would be possible to write something else depending on the protection level. MediaWiki talk:Protectedpagewarning seems like the place to discuss it. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:06, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Maybe if the wording is changed, MediaWiki:Semiprotectedpagewarning should also cover extended protection. epicgenius @ 15:31, 6 April 2016 (UTC) (talk) 15:31, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I created discussion at MediaWiki talk:Protectedpagewarning. epicgenius @ 15:42, 6 April 2016 (UTC) (talk) 15:42, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Citing sources (or authors) with a Wikidata item, but no article

Where we cite a work, or journal, which has a corresponding Wikipedia article, we can make the title a link; and in templates we can use |authorlink= if there is an article about the author. What if there is no article, but there is a Wikidata item? How might we include, and display, the "Q" value, and link to the item? Please see discussion at Help talk:Citation Style 1#Sources (or authors) with a Wikidata item, but no article. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:53, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Can you give an example where this would actually benefit the reader? Resolute 18:58, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

@Resolute: Per WP:MULTI, please discuss at Help talk:Citation Style 1#Sources (or authors) with a Wikidata item, but no article, not here. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:15, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

"Under Title" issue

Hi, I've searched "Cherise Roberts" on Google and under the Wiki title it says "HIDDEN ERROR: Usage of "Instruments" is not recognized" - There's no errors (that I can find on the actual article) so not sure if it's a bug or what, Thanks, –Davey2010^Talk 22:18, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

The source of Cherise Roberts says {{Infobox musical artist|...|Instruments = vocals|...}} The infobox doesn't recognize the parameter name and produces <span class="error" style="display:none">HIDDEN ERROR: Usage of "Instruments" is not recognized</span>. The code display:none prevents it from being displayed in browsers but some editors find it helpful. Your example shows Google does display it without display:none. That's bad. The Google search "HIDDEN ERROR" site:en.wikipedia.org gives me "About 13.000 results". Maybe this system should be reconsidered. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:44, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like Google are scraping the text stripped of all markup. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:57, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

All Google examples I examined were from {{Infobox musical artist}}. The hidden text was added by User:Zyxw in [39]. It also adds Category:Pages using Template:Infobox musical artist with unknown parameters so I don't see much use for hidden text. There may be other templates which add other error messages that don't show up in the above Google search. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:59, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah I did check the infobox the moment I saw the error but obviously didn't think as far as you!, so somehow I've uncovered a big error .... Wow I feel like a genius! , Thanks PrimeHunter & Redrose64 for your help .–Davey2010^Talk 23:37, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

This is why adding hidden content is still a bad idea.. But it seems we forget this lesson about every three years :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:24, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

PrimeHunter, the same for Wikipedia search. Yes, the module and hidden text is used also in other infoboxes. I would say, that text is useful, when you're not an expert of the particular infobox (you don't know which params are supported). Hmm, probably a stupid question, but still... Adding a class to that hidden text and defining it with display:none at Mediawiki:Common.css would have the same effect, right? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:01, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I doubt it would make Google omit the text when they display it now. How about only producing the error message when previewing, and displaying it openly? {{REVISIONID}} is blank on preview and non-blank when saving so {{#if:{{REVISIONID}}||error message}} should work, at least here. I don't know whether it would work in all mirrors which render the wikitext on their own. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:22, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Downtime for wikipedia.org

I read some message about downtime or read-only during some move etc for wikipedia.org. But I can't find it.. Does anyone have a list of planned disruptions of wikipedia.org and where can one find such list? Bytesock (talk) 01:26, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC ... [40] --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:29, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Maybe someone could put it at the end of the front page? Bytesock (talk) 03:45, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

It was advertised on this page at least three times, e.g. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Server migration will prevent editing next week and it's also displayed on the watchlist right now, and has been since 00:58, 11 April 2016 (UTC). I don't think that a main page notice is needed, since it won't affect readers, only editors, and it's going to be significantly less than an hour each time. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:20, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

To whoever makes up these announcements: Please stop stating the day-of-week in conjunction with the UTC time. 14:00 UTC might be Tuesday or Thursday where you live, but it is not necessarily so in other time zones. The only correct way to state a UTC time is with the date and time (eg. 21 April, 14:00 UTC). I have pointed this out before on this very page, and in case it's not understood what I mean, 19 April @ 14:00 UTC will be 2.00 am Wednesday, not Tuesday, where I live. This is not just semantics. It looks damned unprofessional, has the potential to mislead, and can be insulting to those of us who live in time zones that are a long way ahead of or behind UTC. Akld guy (talk) 11:48, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

For the majority of editors, the "UTC day of the week" aligns with their own. Many people don't know the numeric date off the top of their heads (see: every single person who says "What's the date?" when writing a check at the store), but almost everyone knows whether it's a Monday or Tuesday. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:03, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Except that it's NOT a Monday or Tuesday in certain time zones, so it's no justification to say that it suits the majority of editors. To those, like me, whose careers depended on setting schedules with counterparts in other countries, it's not simply bad practice, it's unacceptable. Wikipedia is showing just how foolish its administration is by tolerating this. Akld guy (talk) 16:23, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

It's also not going to be the 19th or the 21st in exactly those same time zones. It seems strange to complain about only the day of the week, when the date is equally "wrong" in your time zone. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:54, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Right, the announcement says "Tuesday, 19 April" and "Thursday, 21 April" in every place I have seen it where the day of the week is included. When the date is stated I don't see the horror in adding the day of the week. It's helpful to me. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:53, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, at 14:00 UTC it will be a different date in my country, but since the announcement quotes the date in UTC, that issue doesn't arise. But the Tuesday/Wednesday issue certainly does arise, since the announcement states that the first event will take place on "Tuesday". It will not be Tuesday in my country, nor in eastern Australia, nor in most of the Pacific Islands. If you dismiss this by saying that only a handful of countries are involved, it gets much worse if the time happened to have been something other than 14:00 UTC.

@PrimeHunter: Look, it's simply incorrect to state the day of week when announcing an event's time in UTC. The UTC time 19 April 2016 14:00 (UTC) enables everyone to work out which day of the week is applicable to his/her time zone. Akld guy (talk) 21:35, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Are you seriously complaining over a time and date ? ... We can't please everyone ...., UTC is widely used and the most recognized one ... if you're having issues understanding it then use some website that converts it for you ... problem solved. –Davey2010^Talk 22:46, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Akld guy, do you have anything other than personal opinion to back up that "it's simply incorrect" claim? BTW, ISO 8601:2004 is the applicable standard, which clearly states "Scope: This International Standard is applicable whenever representation of dates in the Gregorian calendar, times in the 24-hour timekeeping system, time intervals and recurring time intervals or of the formats of these representations are included in information interchange. It includes [...] week dates expressed in terms of calendar year, calendar week number and calendar day of the week..." --Guy Macon (talk) 23:07, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I see that I'm dealing with people who either cannot see what I'm driving at, or can see but are resistant to change and are obfuscating the issue. I've explained myself adequately already, but once again... in the US and UK where some of you live, it is Wednesday right now. Here in New Zealand it's already been Thursday for about 11 and a half hours, ie. it's 11:28 am Thursday. Do you not see that it is wrong to give your time zone's day of the week for a UTC time when it could be a different day of the week somewhere else? Akld guy (talk) 23:27, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

It's now Thursday 14 April in the UK too, has been for 31 mins. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:31, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, yes, I forgot you went onto daylight saving. But you didn't bother to point that out did you? And without realizing it, you've just backed up my argument. If it's 31 minutes past midnight where you are, Redrose, how can it be 23:31 UTC Wednesday when it's just become Thursday for you? Akld guy (talk) 23:49, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

You seem to have an awful lot of external locus of control going on, Akld guy. It's all our fault that we do not understand your clearly argued case, &c. Meanwhile our reading of UTC is that it can have day names associated with dates, and so Tuesday 19 April 14:00 UTC is perfectly fine & dandy. Indeed, it seems only to be you who thinks the Tuesday refers to the poster's local time zone. Ah well. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:51, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

It's misleading to those who aren't in the appropriate time zone. I'm no youngster. I was dealing with this in a former career from as early as 1977 when dealing with overseas administrations. The rule was, when stating a UTC time to a foreign administration, DO NOT use day of week as there is great potential to inadvertently set the wrong day because of the ambiguity. Is the day of week correct and the date a typo, or vice versa? Akld guy (talk) 00:00, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Without a time, the date 19 April 2016 is a Tuesday everywhere in the Gregorian calendar. When converting a time to another time zone, you must convert the day of the week if and only if you also convert the date. For example, Tuesday 19 April 14:00 UTC is Wednesday 20 April 02:00 New Zealand time. Are you saying that if a user in New Zealand sees "Tuesday 19 April 14:00 UTC" then he may think it's Tuesday his time, but if he only sees "19 April 14:00 UTC" then he will correctly convert to 20 April 02:00 New Zealand time and not get the local day wrong? That sounds like a small risk compared to all the users who are helped by getting the day of the week together with the date. I'm often off by one when trying to remember the date, or have to look it up to be sure. I always know the day of the week. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:17, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

"Are you saying that if a user in New Zealand sees "Tuesday 19 April 14:00 UTC" then he may think it's Tuesday his time,..." Yes, that possibility exists because he knows that he must add 12 hours (or 13 during daylight saving), so he adds the 12, gets 2:00 am, but inadvertently assumes the Tuesday instead of his Wednesday. It's a very easy slip to make. Whereas by not mentioning the Tuesday, everyone is forced to work out (or keep track of) not only the time but the day too and there's no ambiguity. Akld guy (talk) 01:25, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

I "didn't bother to point that out" - don't see why I should have done. With the exception of my phrase "now Thursday 14 April in the UK", I always give times in UTC, see for example this signature → Redrose64 (talk) 23:55, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

ProtBot

I don't know if that bot exists or not, but we used to have a bot that added protection templates to protected articles. Can we have that back, pretty please? I see that Tbhotch and now BethNaught are picking up the slack for lazy bums like me who protect but don't template, and I thank them for it, but surely this can be done in an automated fashion. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 17:29, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Might see if User:MusikAnimal and User:MusikBot might be able to take the slack, since they're doing some protection template stuff. --Izno (talk) 17:41, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

The bot you are missing is Lowercase sigmabot. I don't know if Σ is willing to boot it back up, but as we discussed in MusikBot's BRFA, both can coexist peacefully. MusikBot doesn't work in the same way, and while I'm interested in implementing addition of prot templates, and not just removing them, it's going to be quite a while before I could get around to it. Sorry! — MusikAnimal ^talk 17:45, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

WP:Bots/Status lists Lowercase sigmabot as being active in adding and removing protection templates, though its last edit was in 2014. DumbBOT is active, but only removes them. SiBr₄ (talk) 17:43, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Also, Cyberbot II actively adds protection templates, but only for pending changes-protected pages. SiBr₄ (talk) 17:49, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps I can get a copy of Σ's code and bring TPBot (talk · contribs) back to life.--v/r - TP 21:34, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Whatever you geeks can come up with, it will be much appreciated. Thanks. Drmies (talk) 01:39, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Why not just have a gadget display protection indicators? Upside: no adding/removing them. Downside: loss of categorization and loss of indicators for different protection reasons (e.g. {{pp}} instead of {{pp-sock}}). Special:ProtectedPages, Special:ProtectedTitles, and Special:StablePages can be used to find pages by protection type and the protection reason should be indicated in Special:Log. — JJMC89 (T·C) 04:14, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

CharInsert

Once again, this has stopped working (ref.: /Archive 104#Charinsert not working). I used it frequently, and this time I do not find it restored by unchecking the "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" in Preferences → Editing, which I would have to agree would be a less-than-satisfactory solution, anyway. Please help!  Stick to sources! Paine  03:26, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I just copied the example <charinsert>Á á Ć ć É é Í í Ĺ ĺ Ń ń Ó ó Ŕ ŕ Ś ś Ú ú Ý ý Ź ź</charinsert> from the extension page, and previewed it here before typing this response, and it worked just as it should. I have done nothing to my preferences recently. Side note, I didn't even know this existed; cool. So, I can only assume, that if it stops working, that must happen in some specific circumstance that needs targeting. fredgandt 03:43, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

P.S. Tried again after saving, and it worked again. fredgandt —Preceding undated comment added 03:45, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Just checked my editing prefs and I have advanced and toolbar checked. And it still works. fredgandt 04:01, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! When you say that it works, do you get the DEFAULTSORT and other inserts? That's what I am missing. The full CharInsert does not work for me as it did maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago.  Paine  07:35, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry Paine Ellsworth but I don't understand the connection DEFAULTSORT has to the use of charinsert as I'm (not very) familiar with it. Ahh, hang on - you mean the embedded clickable text insertion tool at the bottom of #wpTextbox1!? Well that works too, and has everything I remember it having, including DEFAULTSORT etc.

You know there's a selection dropdown at the left and that DEFAULTSORT (for example) is under "Wiki markup", right? Yeah all working as expected. Sorry about the mixup; I didn't understand your initial statement. fredgandt 00:36, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't know if this is at all relevant, but User:Paine Ellsworth/common.js needs to be updated. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 145#Breaking change: wikibits for details. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:42, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, WAID, and thank you all – everything's working again – can't thank ya'll enough!  Paine  09:05, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Template help

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Implementation discussion (maintenance tag removal)

 – Let's not WP:MULTI this: Per the original request, see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Implementation discussion (maintenance tag removal). (I will copy the original request and Mdann's suggestion from here. --Izno (talk) 12:22, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

There's this neat feature now

Edit summary preview. Someone requested it and it's here. Nice work, devs. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 16:39, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm a might confused; one has been privvy to a summary preview when previewing one's edits for as long as this one can remember. Is there some new way? fredgandt 16:50, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Was it move summary preview then? I got excited for no reason, damn. Atleast I noticed it now, so that's good. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 16:53, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Lua libs for BDD

Interesting grant proposal: m:Grants:IEG/Lua_libs_for_behavior-driven_development. – Danmichaelo (talk) 17:53, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

It is about spec-style tests, the title is somewhat confusing. Jeblad (talk) 08:01, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Missing pages in page counts files

I see that from December 2015, the 'totals' page count files at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ (e.g. https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/pagecounts-2016-02-views-ge-5-totals.bz2) are about 2/3rd the size of what they were before, and I am finding about 20% of the pages that were previously listed in the file are now missing (e.g. look for the page titled 'Haplochromis_gigas' in the latest pagecounts-2016-03-views-ge-5-totals.bz2 file). Is this some sort of bug in the routines that generate this file? Who should I ask about this? Thanks HYanWong (talk) 10:17, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Now raised in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T132761#2209683 HYanWong (talk) 13:11, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you want one Edit tab, or two? It's your choice

How to switch between editing environments

Click the [[ ]] to switch to the wikitext editor.

Click the pencil icon to switch to the visual editor.

The editing interface will be changed soon. When that happens, editors who currently see two editing tabs – "Edit" and "Edit source" – will start seeing one edit tab instead. The single edit tab has been popular at other Wikipedias. When this is deployed here, you may be offered the opportunity to choose your preferred appearance and behavior the next time you click the Edit button. You will also be able to change your settings in the Editing section of Special:Preferences.

You can choose one or two edit tabs. If you chose one edit tab, then you can switch between the two editing environments by clicking the buttons in the toolbar (shown in the screenshots). See Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Switching between the visual and wikitext editors for more information and screenshots.

There is more information about this interface change at mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. If you have questions, suggestions, or problems to report, then please leave a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Whatamidoing (WMF) 19:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

This change has already been made, and I don't see the option to bring back the old behavior in Preferences. Where is it? —danhash (talk) 17:10, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

@Danhash: "Editing mode" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. --Izno (talk) 17:13, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

@Izno: Found it. Thanks! —danhash (talk) 17:16, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Remember that you won't see this option if you have disabled the visual editor ("Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta", immediately above where "Editing mode" either is, or would be if you had the visual editor enabled). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

VE was imposed as primary editor

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T132806

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T128478

The project manager assured me that the WMF would not try to deploy a VE default as part of the Single Edit Tab deployment.[41] Furthermore the Project Manage explicitly stated that on English Wikipedia "the first editor that loads will still be the wikitext editor"[42]

Please revert or fix immediately. If fixed, the popup will need a tweak to the "Switch" text to correctly indicate that the switch goes to Visual Editor. Alsee (talk) 02:54, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I was notified about this at my user talk page, and have just tested it. VE is indeed given as the editor by default, against what was promised. (On a related but less important note, when you switch to wikitext editing you get a popup at the pencil icon stating that you can use this to go to VE editing; but when you switch to VE editing, you don't get a popup at the brackets icon to say that you can use that to go to wikitext editing. All these things, the "oops, error in the rollout", the popups, many other things over the years, only give the very strong impression that the WMF is only interested in pushing VE as hard and as much as they can; by doing this, they have apparently finally reached the 5% of edits done with VE milestone. That's five, not fifty; no idea why the 5% editor would need to be the default editor...). Fram (talk) 07:06, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T131066

Nice catch Fram. I was too focused on the initial default issue to look that far. I've opened a Phab ticket for the editor-switch-popup bug. Title: Faulty "You have switched editors" popup makes it difficult for new users to return to primary editor. (Under the assumption that it's merely a bug that VE is loading first on a VE-Secondary Wiki.) Hopefully it will catch someone's attention and get fixed soon. No one wants new users getting frustrated because they're stranded in the secondary editor. Alsee (talk) 09:40, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

It turns out that there was already a Phab open for it. Alsee (talk) 12:11, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

While we wait for someone at the WMF waking up to the above, I found something else I think is new, and which certainly is unwanted behaviour. I have disabled VE completely in my preferences. However, when I edit a page, I get the "pencil" icon to switch to VE in the right upper corner of the edit screen... Stop pushing this thing on us, WMF! Fram (talk) 14:17, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

respectfully disagree with last comment. even when VE is disabled for some reason, i'd still like to have the pencil icon for special cases. specifically, editing tables, which is painful and error-prone with wikicode, and almost fun with VE (did you ever try to transpose the 5th and 8th column of a not-too-small table by editing the wikicode? i did, and i had to abandon this edit - could not get it right). if the icon is such an eye sore for some users, they can add .oo-ui-icon-edit{ display: none; } to their personal CSS page, rather than advocate depriving everyone else (who disabled VE) any use of this useful tool. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 18:38, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

If you need the VE for special cases, you can easily enable it at that time, just change your preferences for a while. That's less hassle than having a personal css, which shouldn't be necessary to get rid of something which is already "disabled" in the preferences. Fram (talk) 19:21, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Have to agree that a little icon doesn't push anything on anybody, and to press for the eradication of even that tiny VE presence seems extreme. I'll probably never use VE but I can easily ignore that icon. A little give and take never hurts. ―Mandruss ☎ 18:48, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

At least so far, I agree. The pencil icon seems unobjectionable. I want VE to stay the hell out of my way, I want the WMF to stop aggressively trying to push people into it, I want the WMF to stop trying to redefine and complexify wikitext trying to solve VE's deficiencies, but there's no need for a scorched earth approach if the WMF would just back off the VE crusade and allow it to be a supplementary tool. The WMF's own research shows VE has utterly failed to meet it's original rationale. It doesn't help more new users edit, it doesn't help retain new users, it doesn't help them edit more. The idea that VE brings in new users and helps them edit has become a point of pure religion. The WMF is making VE the tail that wags the dog. Alsee (talk) 22:38, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

@Fram: Uh, I see a "Switch to wikitext editor" when in VE mode in the upper right hand corner. Has this been changed since you complained?--v/r - TP 03:55, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

No, that's not what I'm complaining about. I'm complaining about two things, one is that even when you have disabled VE, you still get the (working) switch to VE pencil (which most people here don't seem to find problematic), and the other is that new editors get a popup explaining what the pencil does ("look, VE is that way!"), but not the similar popup to explain what the brackets do '"look, wikitext is that way!"). It's the typical uneven pro-VE attitude shining through. These are all distractions to keep us busy until we have some reply about the main issue of this section though ;-) Fram (talk) 07:17, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

This has been the case for about six months now. It's a misbug: originally unintentional, but it turns out that most experienced editors at this and other wikis are happy about it, so at this point, the devs aren't going to touch it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:09, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

So User:Jdforrester (WMF) has had time to make edits, but (as far as I see) neither he nor anyone else of the WMF has even had the courtesy to acknowledge this problem (which has been noted here, in Phabricator and on his mediawiki talk page: he has edited at the latter two since). Working on better relations with enwiki and restoring mutual trust, one day at a time! What part of "My job is to help make sure the Editing department understand what the community wants and needs, is focussed on the things that matter, and is engaging with and understood by the community."[43] is so hard to understand? This farce has been going on for years... Fram (talk) 19:30, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

The section is less than a day old. I share your desire for this to be addressed hastily, but let's give them fair time to respond, and let's see what that response is. Alsee (talk) 02:21, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

I didn't ask for a solution (I know better than that), but one would expect someone from the WMF, either the project manager or some community liaison, to simply acknowledge the problem at least. They are quick enough to reply to other things, but when they make a mistake, all we get is silence... It's not hard to type a non-committal "I'll look into it", is it? Fram (talk) 07:17, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

It's really easy to slip into pitchfork mode when something like this happens. I am making an effort, with mixed success, to be fair and extend good will to working as partners. I am willing to accept it is not unreasonable if WMF staff have literally not caught this issue yet. I don't expect them to monitor messages 24-7. If someone says "I'll look into it" soon, and there's a reasonable resolution afterwards, okey-dokey. Lets give them more time before jumping to a conclusion that it is being deliberately ignored. Alsee (talk) 08:28, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

I already pinged Whatamidoing (WMF) on my talk page with a link here, but this will serve as a direct ping to this discussion. Alsee (talk) 08:32, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

You posted it to Jdforrester's talk page on mediawiki, and he has edited on that site afterwards, so he (who is responsible for this) surely has been aware of this for quite a while now. So yes, this is being deliberately ignored (or at least deliberately not communicated about) by him. No surprise there, but no need to search excuses for him either. Fram (talk) 09:28, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

FWIW... I'd be quite surprised if James could weigh in here this week, since he's buried (like several other managers, including mine) in a certain series of meetings this week in the office. As soon as he's back and the regular weekly meetings are resumed, Whatamidoing (who may be OoO today if I recall correctly) and/or myself will be able to address your concerns properly. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:35, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Elitre (WMF), please reconsider.

• Reasonable: A statement that someone is on this now and is actively working on a prompt response.
• Reasonable: A rollback of this faulty deployment.
• Reasonable: Opening a bugfix to set wikitext as primary editor, as Forrester promised.
• Not Reasonable: A statement that this is going to be ignored for a week.
• Acceptable: Spending that week organizing multiple international RFCs stating that the WMF lied, stating that the WMF is removing the edit source link, stating that the WMF is imposing VE as the default editor for all new users on the only-remaining link, citing WMF's research establishing that VE provides zero benefit for new users, and asking each community which editor they want as "Primary" editor. Alsee (talk) 00:49, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I just updated the mw:VisualEditor/Rollouts tracking page. I changed the EnWiki deployment from  Done to  Faulty[44]. It is a good faith edit, possibly BRD. The edit can be accepted, the edit can be disputed, but I suspect it won't be ignored. Alsee (talk) 08:51, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I filed a bug because, at least at one point, that wasn't the intended behavior. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:02, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

"Your edit was saved" message not appearing when using Visual Editor?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T132825

I haven't been using VE a lot as I still prefer the traditional editing interface, but I just made an edit using VE and the "Your edit was saved" message did not appear. This is weird, as it used to appear even when I was using VE. Was this feature removed for VE (and in which case I missed the news), or is this a bug? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 12:30, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for this note, Narutolovehinata5. I'm still seeing them in Firefox and Safari on Mac OS. What's your browser and OS? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:13, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I also had this occur to me after saving a page (Safari 9.1, MacOS X). Wonder if it had to do with switching between errors... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:14, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Windows 8, Google Chrome. Yeah, I noticed I got the problem when I switched between using VE and code editing. So maybe that was the problem. The message appears when I use VE and I don't switch. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 23:35, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

How to see my uploads?

I've wondered a while and I still have no idea. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 19:32, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Special:ListFiles should do it. For your uploads it would be Special:ListFiles/QEDK. clpo13_(talk) 19:42, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Or you could go to Contributions and then click Uploads up the top.... –Davey2010^Talk 19:46, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, both of you. --QEDK (T ☕ C) 20:13, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Special:Log/upload/QEDK will also show (as redlinks) your uploads that have been deleted, which the above will not. —Cryptic 20:25, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah even I didn't know that!, Yeah the log's far more extensive. –Davey2010^Talk 20:28, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

The "uploads" link at top of user contributions has a link to the log, and to Commons uploads. The links are made by a customized MediaWiki:Listfiles-summary so registered users only see them if they have the default English interface language. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:09, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Article talk page editing in mobile view is partially broken

Mobile web Wikipedia with chrome. When an article talk page has no section headings, pressing the only edit button available (the one at the very top which would allow you to edit the templates at the top of the page) does nothing. It doesn't load anything. This happens at every page no matter what. If there are section headings on a talk page, pressing that same edit button will result in the editing of the first sub section rather than the 'lead' or it results in the same thing as previously mentioned. This doesn't happen every time like the first problem as sometimes it functions without any problem. So in other words, in mobile view, at some article talk pages, it's impossible to say change the grade and importance of an article or add a WikiProject template. If my post if difficult to understand because it's worded horribly, I will address any comments to explain further. —DangerousJXD (talk) 03:27, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

While I'm here, this problem is still happening. —DangerousJXD (talk) 20:33, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

At first the page has correct links (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:ASDF&action=edit&section=0 and then the same with section=1 and subsequent sections) but around the same time as the "About this talk page" text appears the first link changes to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:ASDF#/editor/1 which goes to the same place as section=1 or displays a spinner icon if there's no section with that number. On some pages the correct /editor/0 appears in the link and when it's /1 the page can still be edited by clicking and then changing it to /0 in the browser. Edit links for other sections stay the same; when the pages are loaded they redirect to /1, /2, etc. It's unclear what is changing this link, and where the 1 is coming from - the API and the original link say 0, which should also be the default value, and it could probably be taken from any of these instead. Peter James (talk) 23:08, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Most visited wikipedia pages

Hello. Is there a way to find the most visited Wikipedia pages of all time? And not only for English Wikipedia. Xaris333 (talk) 17:12, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Here you go. There's no running total—the processing power needed to perform an all-time pageview count would be huge. User:West.andrew.g may be able to help if you want a particular statistic. ‑ Iridescent 17:27, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

@Xaris333: I can't help you with attaining "all-time" stats, but you can query for any date range after August 2015, and for any WMF project, at toollabs:topviews. Hope this helps — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:20, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Gooood... Thanks, MusikAnimal. Actually, I was going to ask you for such tool :) One thing - maybe you can add option to exclude non-articles? There are some special and user namespace pages. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:27, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

I definitely want to add a dropdown to restrict to particular namespaces, but doing so is potentially expensive. I need to do more research. My hope is options like this will be built natively into the pageviews API. Note also a caveat with Topviews... the numbers you see represent the sum of the top 1000 most viewed pages for each day within the provided date range. This means the numbers might be slightly off if a given article was not in the top 1000 at any point during that date range, if that makes sense... This is also due to a limitation of the API, which I'm also going to ask the WMF services team about. To get the exact number for a given article in the list, click on the number of views on the right, which will open that article up in the Pageviews tool. Fortunately it seems most of the time the difference is trivial, but something you should still be aware of. Best — MusikAnimal ^talk 23:50, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

How to populate some requested articles lists

I am often assigning my students articles to develop from the outline pages, and requested articles page. As I am teaching in Korea, my examples are Outline of South Korea, Outline of North Korea and Wikipedia:WikiProject Korea/Redlist. The latter, particularly, is a mess, and I think in general we don't have any system for maintaining such pages. At the same time, I know there are area-topic templates, such as Template:Asia topic and Template:Topic (Asia) (I don't understand why they are separate, but that's an aside). They produce some interesting if unlinkable (as far as I know) templates, see for example the bottom of Poverty in South Korea. Now, here's my question number one: is there a way we can generate a list of all red-linked mentions of South and North Korea topics in such templates? And can we add it to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Korea/Redlist? Currently it is very difficult to use such templates to figure out what topics are missing if one wants to search by country. Ex. if I go to Unemployment in India I can see that South and North Koreas are missing their respective "unemployment in" articles, but I'd love to have a list of all topics missing from such templates so I could assign my students to filling in the gaps. Currently I have no other idea on how to find such missing topics but semi-randomly type "social topic in Korea", see if it is red, see if it exists for some other countries - very cumbersome way of figuring out what important (notable) social issues are missing for Korean topics. Can anyone help? If we can figure out how to do it for other countries and topics, it would be a nice addition to Category:Wikipedia red link lists. PS. If anyone replies here please WP:ECHO me, thanks! --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:23, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Is the page views tool down for you too?

https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews

Is this not working for anyone else too? From the 4th of April onwards, I can't see any page view results, for any page. Anticla rutila (talk) 13:53, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Works for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:35, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

OK PrimeHunter, thanks for checking. I figured it must be a problem at my end. It didn't work in safari (Version 6.2.8), but I tried it in Chrome and it worked. Thank you again. Anticla rutila (talk) 14:43, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

@Anticla rutila: I take it you are stilling running OSX Mountain Lion? Unfortunately it seems Apple doesn't release newer versions of Safari unless you upgrade your OSX. Officially with Pageviews Analysis we're only supporting Safari 8 and newer, which requires OS X Yosemite. Sorry! — MusikAnimal ^talk 16:21, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

@Anticla rutila: Yep MusikAnimal, still using OSX Mountain Lion - I'll update my user system & version of safari. Thank you for your advice! Anticla rutila (talk) 10:25, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Incorrect entries in abuse log

Some entries in the abuse log show a redlink even though the edit has never actually happened and the deletion and move logs for the page are empty. For example, Albaniaf has three entries in the abuse log pertaining to ShqipStadium-Facebook page even though that page has never actually been created. Also, User talk:87.182.28.87, User talk:92.21.230.222, and User talk:198.248.150.147 have no deletion or move log entries but still appear in the abuse log for ClueBot NG. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 17:57, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The IPs are fairly straightforward. The log entries show an action of 'warn'. ClueBot won't be able deal with that, so won't save the page. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 18:13, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Talk page watching

Speaking of watchlist, currently the addition of an article to it also adds the associated talkpage. Is it possible to unbundle these two, so that talkpages could be watchlisted separately from the articles? Was this issue raised before? Brandmeister^talk 12:47, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

That is an excellent question, Brandmeister. I often don't want to see the ongoing llama-drama at a Talk Page, but do want to keep a quiet eye on the article Martinevans123 (talk) 13:20, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The talk page should always be added automatically when you add the page; it would be highly inconvenient for the software to cause you to watch only the article if you weren't intending that. However, it would be nice to have the talk page's watch button work separately from the article's; clicking the watch button at talk would add the talk page only (i.e. you're watching just the talk) or would remove it only. Nyttend (talk) 13:29, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Well it might be highly inconvenient. That would depend on user preference - a survey of user needs might elucidate. But your proposal sounds good. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:48, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

"if you weren't intending that" is the operative phrase :-) I wouldn't mind a gadget that causes the talk page not to be added when you add the article. However, it would be a bad idea to change a core site feature (one that's been available for fifteen-ish years) just to provide a small enhancement for a few situtions. Enabling that enhancement would be good, but only as an add-on. Nyttend (talk) 14:55, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes of course, as you say. Am no great fan of the "but it's always been like that" argument. But happy to have it an an optional feature. Does size of watch list have any bearing on the prevalence of this glitch? Martinevans123 (talk) 17:47, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

"but it's always been like that" is a good reason to oppose a major change unless it's for a big reason: big changes to things to which everyone's accustomed are fundamentally disruptive, so we shouldn't cause that disruption if we don't really have to. Not clear what you mean by "this glitch", as everything's working as intended; are you addressing the misclicks issue raised by Anna Frodesiak? Nyttend (talk) 18:02, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

In general "but it's always been like that" suggests to me that no-one has yet had the talent the ability to imagine that things might be done better a different way. And that no direct user comparison has ever been performed. A more convincing reason might be: "we used to do it like x, but then we improved to do y, and then we optimised it to do x based on newer user's usability feedback." But yeah, folks do get used to things, don't they. Sorry, I thought this was a related sub-thread. Maybe it should be a wholly separate one. I'll ask above, thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:19, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Brandmeister - yes, this has been discussed before - at length (it'll be in the archives). The API can be used to effectively screen what you see and don't on the watchlist, so a Gadget is either possible or already exists. Personally I agree with Nyttend, that The talk page should always be added automatically when you add the page since an interest in one should be an interest in both. fredgandt 16:50, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-16

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

Recent changes

• You can filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [45][46]
• You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [47]
• MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [48]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [49]
• There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on April 19 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is shadow namespaces. The meeting will be on 20 April at 21:30 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:40, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Moving over salted titles

During this AFD I came across this edit where User:NawlinWiki (presumably) inadvertently moved Jordan schaul to Jordan Schaul which was salted. Is there anyway to prevent this happening? I just tested it out and there is no warning when moving a page onto a fully-protected page. This did come up before in 2008 but nothing happened. SmartSE (talk) 22:20, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Template help request - English-only template needs to cater for rest if UK

Template:Infobox Site of Special Scientific Interest turns out to cater only for English SSSIs. Trying to implement a Welsh SSSI gets you a broken locationmap image. Guess the same holds for NI & Scotland). I herewith request assistance by way of template expertise to enable Welsh SSSIs to have an Infobox - see this talk for more. Thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:28, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Arabic glitch

I wrote an article on Munira Thabit and input her name right after the English in Arabic script, as I always do with names that are originally foreign. Though the birth range appeared as typed (1902-1967) it showed on the screen as (1967-1902). As you can see here Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red#Munira Thabit a fellow Wikipedian tried to fix it also, to no avail. Any idea why this is happening? Thanks! SusunW (talk) 23:10, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I've corrected it in the article. For some reason the years get swapped in the edit textbox. This is clearly a right-to-left issue, but I don't think this is supposed to be happening (or was happening earlier). —Ruud 23:24, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Ruud Koot I don't even need you to explain what you did, though Maile66 would probably be interested. The technical stuff is really beyond me and if I can't fix it I am glad to raise my hand. I am totally happy to have it fixed. I knew that it was the left to right text issue, but why it wasn't reading it correctly, I have no idea. Gracias mi amigo. SusunW (talk) 23:33, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

@Maile66: What I think is happening is that the browser sees some Arabic text and goes into right-to-left mode, and then "cleverly" also displays from right-to-left the immediately following years that are on both sides of the dash (the years themselves don't get swapped around because numbers are written in the same direction in Arab as they are in English). The template {{lang-ar}} contains some magic to prevent this from happening when the article is displayed, but that doesn't work in the edit box. I've managed to also stop the browser from "being clever" there, by putting some text in the middle of the numbers. —Ruud 23:57, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Ruud Koot Thanks for the explanation. I'm always interested in how snafus get fixed. I see you inserted the ndash in there as a fix. — Maile (talk) 00:13, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

And now you both have me wondering if the same snafu would happen in say, Hebrew? SusunW (talk) 00:19, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Strangely enough, that doesn't seem to be the case. See User:Ruud Koot/RTL. I have no idea why. —Ruud 00:34, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

No editing

You've probably already seen this, but just a small reminder: No editing for ~30 minutes starts in less than two hours from now. You can read more on Meta. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 12:26, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Editing resumed after about 47 minutes, but first attempt to delete a page gave the following:

[VxZFZQrAAEcAAGB3Z8kAAAAK] 2016-04-19 14:49:11: Fatal exception of type JobQueueError

Not good... Fram (talk) 14:50, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Me too, Johan (WMF). --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 14:58, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

It seems OK now. --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 15:26, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm guessing this was probably related to the cause of phab:T133053; the job queue backs features like recent changes and the watchlist, which were missing entries from the time you encountered this error. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 16:25, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

For the record, no editing was from Special:Diff/716040655 (14:02 UTC) to Special:Diff/716040656 (14:48 UTC). PrimeHunter (talk) 15:36, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

[barnstar of technical cleverness] for digging up those links:) DMacks (talk) 16:02, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

More than usually buggy

Has anyone else noticed Wikipedia being more than usually buggy since the planned outage earlier today? I am getting more frequent edit-conflicts-with-self, database locked for maintenance notices, and Wikimedia down notices. DuncanHill (talk) 21:19, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I note that the elements in my edit window are very tiny. I have a 4K monitor, so my size setting is at 200%, but the elements and the text in my edit window looks like it's running 100%. Other than that, no.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 21:36, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm getting some lag beyond what I usually experience every now and then, but other than that, no, no issues for me. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 21:40, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I have had some database locked messages. Keith D (talk) 21:42, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I seem to be getting the database notice on every page I've edited so far, Other than that It all seems fine to me. –Davey2010^Talk 21:43, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

That watchlist jump that makes us misclick

You know how when the watchlist loads and then at the last minute the top announcements that you dismissed vanish? The whole watchlist jumps up a few lines. That makes me accidentally hit rollback from time to time. I'm probably not the only one.

So, can't we instead have the option of a little notification somewhere linking to a page with announcements? Wouldn't that fix it?

Anna Frodesiak (talk) 05:52, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for posting here Anna. I struggle with this too. Jytdog (talk) 06:06, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

And me. Thanks Anna for opening this discussion. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 06:13, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Me too. A very regular and troublesome problem. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:47, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, thank you. If you dismiss the announcement, it shouldn't load at all. The dismiss status needs to be checked before the page loads, not after. Akld guy (talk) 06:16, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Stopgap solution: put #watchlist-message { display:none; } in your user css and watchlist MediaWiki:Watchlist-details. I've done something similar with the sitenotice for years. —Cryptic 06:17, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

For the watchlist messages this can be fixed by depoying this updated JS code and a new piece of CSS. Which admin wants to ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:16, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

TheDJ, I was going to ask whether you were familiar with the coding and could stand behind it, but now I see that you're a developer. Only one issue remains: what do I do with it? Instead of suggesting that I deploy it, please give me the entire code for the destination (and a link, to ensure that I go to the right place), with your new piece added. I don't trust myself to add it to the right spot on the page, but copy/pasting the entire page's code should be failproof. Nyttend (talk) 14:41, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I got it. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 16:14, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Was this intended to break the ability to permanently hide all watchlist notices with #watchlist-message { display:none; }? – Steel 17:32, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Intended, no, but that CSS rule won't work anymore since it is not strong enough. You'll need something like: #watchlist-message { display:none !important; }. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:37, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Does size of watchlist have any bearing on the prevalence of this glitch? Martinevans123 (talk) 18:20, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The size of your watchlist has no bearing on this. At most the size of the part that you DISPLAY of your watchlist could have any bearing on it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:31, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. It must be my imagination that it's got worse over the course of 7 years. Or I've unwittingly changed the size of the part displayed. Or the top announcements have got bigger. Or I've learned to progressively click too impatiently. Or something else. I guess. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:36, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Anna! The struggle is real. I'm glad someone brought this up. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 18:34, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I have found that there are three things that cause watchlist jumping, they are largely independent. They are: (i) not clicking [hide] on all geonotices; (ii) clicking [dismiss] on any non-geonotice messages; (iii) disabling "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold (see customizing watchlists for more options)" at Preferences → Gadgets → Watchlist. There may be others. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:32, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

yeah the "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since " issue is the largest remaining one, that is a bother even if you dismissed the messages. The case of jumping when there are unread messages is harder to fix. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:11, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

@Edokter: I realize that I probably broke geonotices with that change to the watch list messages. Geonotices use the same div, but don't explicitly show the parent #watchlist-message element, when there are messages for display. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:18, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

@TheDJ: I didn't study the code in detail. Is there anything specific that should be done to fix it? Revert? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:43, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

@Edokter: Can you add .show() to line 111 of MediaWiki:Gadget-geonotice-core.js ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:06, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

 Done. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:03, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks all. I don't understand much of the above, but it seems fixed now. Is that right? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 01:37, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Shared tabular data storage for Commons!

CCing from commons, please participate there as this will be a cross-wiki shared feature

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T120452

During the last hackathon I created a new on-wiki tabular storage described in T120452, similar to CSV and TSV formats. It allows any user to create a page, e.g. "Data:List of interesting facts.tabular" (demo), and keep it as a table, rather than wiki text. Tabular storage allows strings, numbers, Booleans (true/false), and "localized strings" – a string that has different value depending on the language. Additionally, tabular data stores metadata, such as description (localized) and license. More metadata can be added as needed.

Tabular storage greatly simplifies storing data for lists, tables, and graphs. Graphs may directly access tabular data, and on-wiki tables and lists can be created by using simple Lua scripts. This storage is fundamentally different from Wikidata, because it works with "blobs" (batches) of data, whereas Wikidata works with tiny "facts". Wikidata technology is simply not suited for large storage such as the list of the most expensive paintings, the shoe size comparisons table, or data to plot Moscow subway growth graph.

After a long discussion, it seems Commons is the best fit for such data. Commons community already has good experience with international multi-licensed content. The current proposal is to create the data namespace on Commons, and use it from all of the wikis.

Feel free to experiment with it at http://data.wmflabs.org/wiki/Data:Sample.tabular. Note that you can view it with different languages, e.g. http://data.wmflabs.org/wiki/Data:Sample.tabular?uselang=fr

Technical notes: When storing, the data is validated and stored as JSON, so there are no delimeter problems common to the traditional CSV/TSV files. At this point, the wiki editor shows tabular data as a JSON, but very soon I hope to have a CSV/TSV editor to simplify copy/pasting, and afterwards – a full scale spreadsheet table editor. Eventually, I would also like to implement Q number support, allowing direct links to Wikidata. --Yurik (talk) 20:54, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Very interesting, thanks. In case you have posted this elsewhere, I fixed the commons link in the first line. Johnuniq (talk) 02:00, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Can't save edits from the default editor?

I originally posted this to the help desk, it was recommended that I ask here.

I can't save changes made in the default editor. When I click the "Save page" button it just reloads the edit page with a message to sign in (I have not tried signing in, this should be unnecessary). My IP does not appear to be blocked, and if I use the visual editor my changes save correctly. This is not a new problem, it's affected me for at least a few months.

I'm using Chrome on Windows 7. I have tried with IE11 and it works fine. I can also edit at work, from Chrome on Linux (what I'm doing right now). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2620:0:1019:13:7009:5270:E0D7:8D0D (talk) 04:28, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Receiving wikipedia emails 6 hours late

So I just got a Wikipedia email alerting me to a post on my talk page from another user, only the edit was made 6.5 hours ago by MarnettD.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 22:18, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that some of the logs entries were lost and re-added. For example, my notifications show two entries "Pegship‬ thanked you for your edit on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting‬", one a few minutes ago, the other eight hours ago (which I noticed this morning). They both relate to this edit, but there is only one entry in the thanks log - the one that should be there from eight hours ago is missing. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:04, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Got two more emails. 3 hours gap.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 23:26, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

The mail server in Carrollton wasn't set up quite right, so email broke for a few hours after the datacentre switch. You can see the server's queue graph at [50]. The peak of the graph is roughly when someone reported it and ops fixed it. It should have been working normally since that went back down to 0. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 14:17, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Strange file usage problem

If you take a look at File:Pulling Strings movie poster.jpg, you will find that the file usage section reports that the file is in use on the page Pulling Strings (film), and only on that page. On the other hand, if you ask the database where the file is used (see quarry:query/9163), then the database reports that the file is used on page #50035842 (Pulling Strings (film)) and additionally on page #50084289 (doesn't exist, the query reports it as being in the draft namespace), and as a result, it looks as if the file is violating WP:NFCC#9. What's causing this and what exactly is page #50084289? --Stefan2 (talk) 15:00, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

• Might be Draft:Pulling Strings (film) (but the file is commented out there) but that page's ID is 50053934 not 50084289. Maybe that ID is a deleted page; not sure how curid does work when one uses an ID of a deleted page.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:25, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
  • You see MediaWiki:Title-invalid-empty if you use curid with the page number of a deleted page, I think. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:32, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
    • Based on phab:T73578 it seems you are right.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:39, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
      • That report suggests that you can find the page title by searching for log messages, so I did this: quarry:query/9167. Page #50084289 had the title Draft:Pulling Strings (film) but was deleted per WP:G6 to merge the history of two pages, and the page got a new page number when the revisions were undeleted. Is there a way to remove the claim that File:Pulling Strings movie poster.jpg is used on page #50084289 so that it no longer looks as if the file violates WP:NFCC#9? --Stefan2 (talk) 16:25, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
        • If the query is reading deleted pages, that's probably a bug - content of deleted pages should not be visible to regular users, generally (c.f Wikipedia:Viewing deleted content).Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:44, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
          • The query for finding WP:NFCC#9 violations, quarry:query/1203, reads the imagelinks table, which is not supposed to contain references to deleted pages. Entries are supposed to be removed from that table when a page is deleted or when a file is removed from a page. --Stefan2 (talk) 17:02, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

watchlist, recent changes list missing some entries

Resolved

 – The missing data has been backfilled. This issue is now resolved. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 22:58, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T133053

The history page for Help talk:Citation Style 1, here, shows that I made edits to that page at 15:03 UTC and 15:09 UTC. This page is on my watch list but niether of those edits appear there. When I looked at Special:RecentChanges, filtered for the Help talk namespace, my edits are not listed.

It appears that someone broke something in the recent server move.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:21, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

• There was about 15 minutes when recent changes and watchlists weren't updating due to a config error. Missing records will not be re-inserted automatically, but it's my understanding that developers will try to manually run a script to recover them. Changes made now will show in RC and watchlists. Mamyles (talk) 15:24, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
• @Trappist the monk: Thanks for the report. This was due to the recent data centre migration that took place earlier today. The issue is tracked in phab:T133053. I edited the title of this section a bit to make it clearer what happened. Thanks again. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 16:24, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Please tell me I'm not the only one on here who tried to use Listen to Wikipedia to figure out when the site would be back up, and was rather confused when edits were being allowed but that site was silent! :-) Oh well, these things happen. I'll try the same procedure out tomorrow. Graham87 07:40, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

I understand that "Listen to Wikipedia" depends upon Special:RecentChanges and Wikimon working. Special:RecentChanges had some difficulties yesterday for about 20 minutes. As of three hours ago (and subject to change), the Ops team seemed to think that there would be a short delay for Special:RecentChanges – a big improvement, but not complete success.

There is, as always, a chance that they'll decide to postpone the planned switch back (to the regular servers in Virginia). Even things outside their control, such as a power outage at the last second, could scuttle the whole thing. However, as of this moment, everything is proceeding under the assumption that the switch back will happen as planned. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Unable to download PDF files of articles

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T133136
Resolved

Following this on the help desk, I attempted to download a PDF of an article myself, only to get an error that states that the file cannot be found. This also appears to line up with the recent updates, so I decided to list this here as well. -- The Voidwalker ^Discuss 00:23, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Hello, thanks for reporting this issue. I could confirm it and created T133136 on Phabricator. The issue is being investigated by Operations right now. DZahn (WMF) (talk) 05:22, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Update: Also see this and this. DZahn (WMF) (talk) 05:32, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Update 2: Please try again. Issue should be fixed now. DZahn (WMF) (talk) 05:54, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, I've left a note at the Help desk that this is fixed. -- The Voidwalker ^Discuss 20:18, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Strange image behavior

Pilsner glass from Brauerei Schloss Eggenberg

Pilsner glass from Brauerei Schloss Eggenberg

I have never seen this one before. These two images are identical except that the one on the right has an "upright" parameter. (The one on the left has a "left" parameter but that makes no difference.) On my screen anyway (Firefox) the one on the right renders sideways. How did that happen? Kendall-K1 (talk) 19:19, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

The 220px one is rotated for me, while the 170px one looks correct. This is a problem which sometimes happens. Image thumbnails are cached and sometimes the server forgets to update old thumbnails when the file is overwritten, but the problem tends to go away if you wait for a few days or months. The solution is to use a different file size. 220px is a very common thumbnail size, and many images are therefore cached in that thumbnail size. Try using [[File:Schloss Eggenberg Hopfenkönig.jpg|221px|thumb]] or something to force a different size, and remember to remove the page size whenever MediaWiki has corrected the 220px thumbnail. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:54, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Server transfer went too long

It was originally announced that the migration of servers to Dallas would take only 15 to 30 minutes, however, it took longer than expected, and it started a bit late. Rather precise, the transfer began at 15:03 BST and would end around more than 40 minutes later. In addition, there were cases when there was a server difficulty and we were shown an error page which can allow us to search for archived mirrors by using Google. I wonder what went wrong during the lost time? Has WMF issued any statement regarding what happened? 49.148.29.21 (talk) 00:33, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Things never go to plan. It started 3 minutes late, and ended 10 minutes late. For a server move that's pretty good. Nothing to worry about here. Also since the wiki is being moved it's reasonable to assume that site errors where going to crop up as the domain points to a new physical location.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 01:06, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

@49.148.29.21: Sounds like you're just curious about how server administration works here. Fortunately, #wikimedia-operations is a public channel, so you can look back on all the fun stuff that happened during the switchover. Starts at 1400. Mamyles (talk) 19:13, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Usually, Ops posts reports on outages at wikitech:Incident documentation. In this case, they will probably do something bigger. But I wouldn't expect them to write up anything until at least next week. They're busy getting ready to switch back to the Virginia servers right now (same time; watch wikitech:Switch Datacenter#Schedule for Q3 FY2015-2016 rollout for possible changes). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:22, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

AFD link on article talk page fails

At Talk:Emoji there is a link which should lead to an AFD debate regarding an article.It says "💮 was nominated for deletion. The debate was closed on 05 March 2013 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Emoji. The original page is now a redirect to here. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here." It is part of a template. Instead of leading to the old AFD debate, clicking on "the debate" directs the reader to the current set of AFDs being debated. The template is there, and the (former) name of the article (just an emoji symbol, since redirected to Emoji) is included. Is there a problem with the template working in general? Does it not work when the article title was just one emoji symbol?Edison (talk) 13:58, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

A required parameter was removed in [51]. I have restored it.[52] PrimeHunter (talk) 19:01, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt corrective action. Edison (talk) 04:00, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia to the Moon

Hello! Sorry that this is in English only, but we are using village pump messaging in order to reach as many language communities as possible. Wrong page? Please fix it here.

This is an invitation to all Wikipedians: Wikimedia Deutschland has been given data space to include Wikipedia content in an upcoming mission to the Moon. (No joke!) We have launched a community discussion about how to do that, because we feel that this is for the global community of editors. Please, join the discussion on Meta-Wiki (and translate this invitation to your language community)! Best, Moon team at Wikimedia Deutschland 15:35, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Template:Col-2

There is bug in where {{Col-2}} is used. Bare code | style="width:50%; text-align:left; vertical-align:top;" | displays in articles. Eg: River Cam or style="width:50%; text-align:left; vertical-align:top;". --AntanO 11:10, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

To use {{Col-2}}, you need to use {{Col-begin}} and {{Col-end}} as explained on the documentation page. On that page, however, I think you actually want {{Refbegin|30em}}. Relentlessly (talk) 11:27, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@Relentlessly: They're not references. @AntanO: It's best to avoid manual column breaks, for accessibility reasons. In this case you want a normal unordered (bulleted) list to show as multiple columns, for which the {{div col}}/{{div col end}} construct is eminently suitable, like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:59, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks @Redrose64:. Usage of {{div col|small=yes|colwidth=35em}} and {{div col end}} look good. I think we need to cleanup these style="width:50%; text-align:left; vertical-align:top;". --AntanO 13:11, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Redrose64, I suggested it only because it was already being half-used. Relentlessly (talk) 15:54, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

About the "delete" function

Just wondering, is it technically possible to allow the "delete" function to be enabled for only (a) specific namespace(s)? Im thinking of a new user group that may include something like this, but all I really want to know right now is if it is technically possible. Steel1943 (talk) 20:25, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Almost anything is technically possible. The better question is always: how much time, energy and money are you willing to feed the problem with. If the question is, is this already implemented in MediaWiki, then the answer is no. There is only one user right for page deletion and it applies to all namespaces. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:04, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

• @TheDJ: Thanks for that explanation! Steel1943 (talk) 17:16, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Category:Song articles with missing songwriters

There appears to be a bot adding articles to this category without reason. For example A Day in the Life and Billie Jean. Should be less than 400 members in the cat. --Richhoncho (talk) 17:19, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@Richhoncho: See Template talk:Infobox song#Missing songwriters. There is no bot. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:58, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@Redrose64:. Trouble is the two examples I gave above shouldn't have been added and there is way of removing the additions, they are not there, and, more strangely, appear in the history of the articles before the cat was created! --Richhoncho (talk) 18:01, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, they will do, that is because the change was in {{Infobox song}}. Previous versions of articles always transclude the current version of a template. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:04, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

OK, there are articles being added when songwriters are in the infobox, (i.e. A Day in the Life and Billie Jean, as mentioned above) but I have taken that back to Missing Songwriters. --Richhoncho (talk) 18:17, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

A Day in the Life has two infoboxes, {{Infobox song}} and {{Infobox single}}. Both of them have the ability to put pages in Category:Song articles with missing songwriters, the relevant change for the latter infobox is this. Both changes are covered by Template talk:Infobox song#Missing songwriters, which I mentioned earlier. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:54, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Page viewer overload

I was just wondering: I tried to read Prince (musician) a few minutes ago, and ran across this error text:

Sorry, the servers are overloaded at the moment.

Too many users are trying to view this page. Please wait a while before you try to access this page again.

Pool queue is full

I completely understand the reason why this is happening: A lot of readers are trying to view this page since the subject of the article was just reported to pass away. But my question is: Does anyone here know how many viewers are "too many users" when it comes to the amount of people trying to view a page at once? Just wonderful since I've never seen this error message before. Steel1943 (talk) 17:19, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

• I think it happened with Michael Jackson too, a few years ago. I sense a pattern. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:01, 21 April 2016 (UTC)
  • @Redrose64: The coverage of Michael Jackson's death took down all WMF wikis for a few hours. After that incident, PoolCounter (described by Deskana below) was put in place to prevent such an incident from taking down the entire site. What User:Steel1943 saw was PoolCounter doing what it was designed to do: breaking the Prince article to protect the rest of the site. The problem is caused specifically by lots of people trying to read the article right after it's been edited, and so PoolCounter only limits the number of viewers right after an edit. But when there's an edit every 10-20 seconds, "right after an edit" is all the time. Now that the edit activity has calmed down a bit (one edit every few minutes now, compared to 4-6 edits per minute when you posted your question), you shouldn't see this issue any more. The servers are able to handle many people viewing the same article (Main Page gets that every day), as long as it's not being edited at a frantic pace. --Roan Kattouw (WMF) (talk) 18:54, 21 April 2016 (UTC)
• @Steel1943: Good question! There's no single number for how many people is too many; it'll depend on a variety of different, complex factors. The error you ran in to was caused by the PoolCounter, which attempts to mitigate server strain when an article is edited faster than the servers can handle. Now that editing has slowed down, this problem should hopefully not happen again. Hope that helps. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:21, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Category:Wales railway station stubs

Hi, can somebody create me a list organized by county? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:23, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Which flavour of county, Dr. Blofeld? PetScan looks like it may cooperate, to the extent that the stubs have sane cats. (And, note, many of the Welsh railway stubs are by now far beyond stubs & need de-stubbing. I'll not touch them until after the 1st May.) --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:33, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

By modern county I think, they can then be sifted into preserved counties. Yes, some of them meet length requirements but destubbing is more than just about length, the information has to all be sourced. Not a problem, plenty of SSSI stubs to expand ;-)♦ Dr. Blofeld 14:21, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes. I was going to slip them in. I'll have a play with rail stations tonight - seven or so hours hence. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:51, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld Full list on my talk page. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:56, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@Tagishsimon: Your problem was that you included level 2 headings in the collapsed section. I would have done it as nested lists thus:

I was also preparing a list, it's not yet finished, but the above shows how I was doing it. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:41, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, that'd work, thanks. Bit new to this collapsing lark. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:00, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Strange problem with Template:Fb rs

See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football#{{Fb rs}}. For some reason, {{Fb rs}} now displays positive overall and away goal differentials above the wikitable. I have tested a solution which appears to work in my sandbox (code at User:Jkudlick/sandbox/Fb rs), but when I applied it, it didn't fix the error and actually started making negative goal differentials in some articles disappear. I reverted all changes I made to {{Fb rs}} and {{Fb gd}}, and we need someone with more template experience than I have to take a look and see if there is an explanation. — Jkudlick • t • c • s 04:18, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

The error was solved by another editor. The removal of {{Unicode}} removed a leading non-breaking space from {{Fb gd}} which was required for proper functionality. A   was hardcoded and the error was fixed. — Jkudlick • t • c • s 04:25, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Twinkle AFD and redirects issue

I used Twinkle to nominate Reactions to the death of Prince for deletion. While I was typing up my rationale, the article was turned into a redirect to Prince (musician) ([53]). This caused Twinkle to put the AFD notice on Prince's BLP ([54]). Not sure if this qualifies as a "bug", but it certainly could use fixing. Not sure if this is the right place (and if not, please direct me to where I should raise this issue). Please ping me if you reply. Thanks! EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 05:34, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Finding the most viewed Wikipedia articles on education

Hi all

I'm trying to use TreeViews to get information on what are the most viewed articles in Category:Education, unfortunately such large categories just crash my browser, it means I will have to split the query up into at least 50-100 smaller queries.

Does anyone know of a less manual way around this? Ideally the output would be spreadsheet of the article title and the number of page views of the article for a 30, 60 or 90 period in the recent past. I will use Treeviews if it is the only way but I'd really love to save myself from half a day of data entry. I imagine this would also be useful for people working with other organisations for other subjects.

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 12:12, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@John Cummings: If the set of articles bearing the {{WikiProject Education}} template is a close enough approximation to the set of articles in Category:Education, then you might find Wikipedia:WikiProject Education/Popular pages useful. --Worldbruce (talk) 01:41, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

@Worldbruce:, thanks very much, its not exactly what I was looking for but is definitely a good proxy, thanks again. John Cummings (talk) 08:17, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Community input requested for development of an informational template

I just created {{subst:wiki tech info}} (documentation to follow development) to make the job of passing on a basic where-to-start guide to the technical aspects of MediaWiki sites easier.

I'd like to actively invite you (yes you) to assist in fleshing it out, so the next time you'd like to help someone get started with this stuff, you can rest assured that this template provides a good basic roundup of key links and info.

I hope you'll see by the current content, the aim is not to overwhelm or baffle, but simply to collect together relevant resources across the sister sites in a non-scary overview of possibilities.

Thanks. fredgandt 22:43, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Wouldn't Help:Wiki_markup fulfill that need?--v/r - TP 07:05, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Is that some kind of user template (=presumably only you need it) or Wikipedia essay in the template namespace? I'm a fan of {{Sofixit}} (as template, and as "not yet" policy), but you could also transclude a project page or subst: a user subpage.

Maybe start with the spec. (/doc or inline), depending on the spec. it could be implemented in other ways, e.g., as {{welcome/tech}} subpage. – Be..anyone 💩 07:18, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

TParis - Wiki markup is one of the linked resources. The idea is to be able to quickly offer a linked overview of technical capabilities and where to find further info about them, not only a how to compose pages.

Be..anyone - Your presumption is hopefully wrong; standardized messages assist editors by simplifying the process of passing information to others. There's no reason to assume that I am the only editor willing to help others find their feet. No it's not an essay or anything to do with policy, and although I could indeed subst the information from a subpage of my user space, this creation is not only for me to use. Why implement it in other ways? A standardized message in the template space is entirely proper. fredgandt 09:34, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

That was a question, not an assumption. I wouldn't use it as is, or presumably never. Sometimes I link (not transclude) sofixit, sometimes I use welcome (subst by bot), and for a tech info I suggest to add m:Tech/News and/or VP/T. –Be..anyone 💩 09:44, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Technical help for expert review?

BMJ, the publishers of the British Medical Journal and other top-tier biomedical journals, have kindly recruited the best minds they can get to review Parkinson's disease.

We began the review by passing the article, in a Word document, from one reviewer to the next by email. Each made proposed changes to the article text and left comments in the document, using Word's "Review" and "Track changes" features.

At that point we needed to start a discussion, and Word isn't ideal for that. So I pasted the relevant paragraphs from the Word document into the left column of a wiki table, and the reviewers' comments into the right column, where the discussion could happen (here). I manually applied background colours to distinguish deletions from additions in the left column, using <span style="background:#xxxxxx">.

That discussion has now begun but one of the many things I've learned during all this is, the top researchers and theorists spend a lot of time in the air (travelling to conferences, lectures, meetings), and it is then, free from the demands of job and family, when they do their reviewing.

So, yesterday, I pasted that table into Word and have made it available to the reviewers (here). Now they can download a copy before they get on a flight, and email it back to me with their comments when they're online again, and I'll transcribe their comments into the wiki table.

This may be as simple as it gets but I just thought I'd put this before you, in case you may have any thoughts on a better technical approach for next time. (BMJ have offered to do more of these.) I'm finding the construction of the wiki table tedious (particularly highlighting the deletions and additions), and transcribing offline comments from the Word document into the wiki table will be a small chore. The wiki table pastes easily into Word with highlighting and formatting intact, but not vice versa. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 04:59, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Forgive my being simplistic, but it seems you're unnecessarily convoluting a procedure MediaWiki software was designed to handle. That is, multiple editors working on and discussing an article. By taking the text out of the wiki, working on it and bringing a new version back, the history and attribution will be effectively corrupt, entirely aside from the whole process being clearly taxing. I think it's especially important to maintain a genuine edit history for attribution in this case, since there appears to be a not minor possibility of a conflict of interest concern. fredgandt 06:55, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Fred, you make a very good point about conflict of interest. What we're doing here is, under the oversight of one of the world's most prestigious journal publishers and editors, applying a highly stringent peer review model to a Wikipedia article, one element of which is transparency. BMJ's editor-in-chief, Fiona Godlee is an expert and has published widely on peer review. She and the organisation under her are strident evangelists for open science and open access. In our first meeting we agreed the reviewers would have to be named and declare their COIs and potential COIs. I think that's the best way to deal with reviewers' interests. Their peers will review their declarations so, hopefully that scrutiny will keep them honest. It's not perfect but I think transparency and a public declaration of interests is the least ineffective approach in peer review. What appears in the article is up to the Wikipedia editors, and Wikipedia's best biomedical editors are a tough crowd.

The edit history of the Word document is saved by the "Track changes" feature and the remainder of the process happens on-wiki, so the review's edit history is preserved.

I'd love to do it all on-wiki but these people need to be able to work on this stuff offline. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 10:37, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good Anthony; if Word is able to keep track of the changes for attribution, and they're comfortable editing with it, the major hurdle is the work you're doing to rebuild the table, correct? Notepad++ can do some nifty things which might be handy. Are you any good with Regular expressions? Could the use of the new fangled Visual Editor version of Wikipedia help? I might be able to build you some dandy web app to help, but would need to see the practical workflow and sleep on it. fredgandt 10:50, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

(I don't know where I got the idea you mentioned COI. I'm in another conversation about this; it must have been someone there.)

Let's all sleep on it for a while. Just articulating my problem here has helped me to put it in perspective - it's pretty trivial, really. Considering what the reviewers and editors are contributing.

I'm using the VE for half my edits, I think, and the reviewers are only using the VE. They'll have to use wikitext when the review moves to the article's talk page, but I'm so glad they can begin with Word and Visual Editor. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 11:05, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

I did mention COI, but only as a possible concern. It's mainly attribution that first struck me as a big problem, but I see now that the final wiki editing will take place after the review. Anyhoo - the technical issue of building and rebuilding the table - not easier with the VE? I must admit to not having even tried it.

Notepad++ has an export feature that outputs HTML describing the syntax highlighting which could save you a lot of work. I'm not certain (experimentation required) but you should be able to paste the replies you get into NP++, then save as a custom language with the highlighting you require, then export as HTML to paste into your sandbox. All the highlighting would be already done. The devil's in the details. fredgandt 11:30, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

The visual editor doesn't preserve his color-coding or text formatting. The table itself is fine, but there's no "highlighter marker" available. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:13, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

(Ah. I see it now.) Thanks for the NP⁺⁺ tip, Fred. I'll have a play with it. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:25, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

@Anthonyhcole: - I have a simple (more or less) solution for part of the problem for you. A way to maintain the highlighting when you copy from Word and paste into the wiki. I'll be back after code wrangling (will require a small amount of JavaScript). fredgandt 08:36, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 12:34, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

User:Fred_Gandt/contentEditTable.js <-- still a bit sketchy, but my dog needs a walk. I'll explain when I get back. Fundamentally it turns the table cells of the preview of one of the tables (per section basis) in your sandbox into a contenteditable version of itself. You can then copy the equivalent cell from the browser editing version of the Word doc, and paste it into the editable cell. The syntax highlighting is maintained. Then down by the save button there's another marked "Get raw table HTML", which when clicked, populates the textbox (you're in preview remember) with the HTML of the table (with some tweaks). Then preview that markup and the sky falls! Like I say, I have to walk my dog, so play around if you like. I'll be able to walk you through it and take feedback and solve problems when I return. fredgandt 13:45, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Fred. Have I done this right? I went to the "Introduction" table in my sandbox, clicked "Edit source", then "Show preview". The "Get raw table HTML" button appears but I can't edit the cells. (I'm in Vector on Chrome on Windows 10.) --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 01:56, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

@Anthonyhcole: - Sorry - for use with the normal (no Visual Editor) mode. I'll upload some screen capture later to assist. fredgandt 08:22, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Yep, I am using the normal mode. I should be able to copy the contents of a cell from this "Word online" document into a table in my sandbox (into the preview, not the edit box), right Fred? How do I make the table cell in the preview editable? Do I have to double-click or something? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 11:25, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

I shall ping you with a link to a video of me using it in a while. I have to eat my lunch and wallow in the afterglow of a stuffed belly first :-) fredgandt 12:08, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Wow. Take your time. I really appreciate your engagement. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 14:21, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

@Anthonyhcole: Interrupted by Wiki maintenance - upload linked at the top of User:Fred Gandt/contentEditTable#Use. Short and simple. fredgandt 15:35, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

For the record, Fred addressed my queries at my talk page, and now I can copy and paste from Word Online into the wiki table, preserving my highlighting and strikethroughs. Thank you Fred! --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 00:05, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

 fredgandt 00:43, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

The issue concerns external review of medical articles by experts, and a discussion saying that such a review should not happen would only derail this important request. I'm hoping Anthonyhcole will get a reply from someone who knows how to handle it (perhaps try WP:Reference desk/Computing?), but if no one wants it I might have a look although I've never fiddled with review text in a doc file. Johnuniq (talk) 07:47, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

I was going to let it slide, but changed my mind; don't fob me off as some idiot passer by that's getting in the way. Read what I wrote and try again. Talk about derailing?! Just exactly where did anyone suggest that the review shouldn't happen? Thankfully Anthony was capable of reading and responding properly, so with my question (of why this can't be done normally) answered, we can move on to making his life easier. fredgandt 11:12, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi Johnuniq. A discussion saying that such a review should not happen would be misconceived because it's out of Wikipedia's control. Wikipedia's rules kick in and the community exercises total control once the review is done and it arrives on the article talk page. It's entirely up to Wikipedia what it does with it. I hope some interested, intelligent editors take some notice, and engage the reviewers in polite but rigorous discussion of their proposals.

Don't worry too much about the technical question I raised. This present set-up is working (I think) and it's really not very onerous when measured against the payback. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 10:37, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Export as PDF, import into Word and then you can use the Word reviewing tools (it's there in Word 2013, I don't know about previous versions). You can get the end product and submit it for review on-wiki by peers. Shouldn't that do it? --QEDK (T ☕ C) 11:19, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

That's sort of what we're doing but between the Word review and the review appearing on the article's talk page we're having an intermediate conversation, making sure the reviewers' suggestions conform to WP policy, and sorting out differences between the reviewers. Word's review format isn't ideal for that kind of extended conversation about details in a long document. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:25, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Regarding connecting to wiki in other languages

I assume the content in wiki is free, so I'm building an android app that shows wiki content.

I show random pages by using Java to connect to "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random"

However, going to "https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random" doesn't work!

I only use a simple code to connect:

  URL url = new URL(site);
  HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
  connection.setRequestMethod("GET");
  connection.setRequestProperty("Accept", "application/xml");
  (InputStream) connection.getContent()

but connection.getContent() is null in Hebrew, but not in English. Why?

Also, I have many other connection problems when I try to get data. Do you have a mechanism that says "Person 'X' can get 'Y' bytes of data, and other requests are rejected"? רן כהן (talk) 07:16, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Going to https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random works for me, as does he:Special:Random. Using those links, I've gone to about six different articles; I can't read Hebrew, so I don't know what they were about, but the pictures were different so they must have been different pages. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:39, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Is there any limit on the number of calls I can make to the wiki server? רן כהן (talk) 12:59, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Please always set a user-agent. Also, why are you requesting xml and not "*/*", as to why you have connection problems.. That I'm not sure.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:59, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

I have a small java class that does what is required... I ask xml because its easy to get...

So tell me - what is my limit? How many bytes per second? רן כהן (talk) 06:43, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Use the API. As long as it is single threaded, you should be fine throttle-wise. MER-C 08:18, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Missing edit summary on desktop view from iPad

I don't know if this is the place to do it but there is a bug with the Desktop view from an iPad. When viewing the history of a page the edit summaries are all missing. On PC: http://imgur.com/egg9tyC On iPad: http://imgur.com/MmSyVkh --IngenieroLoco (talk) 23:01, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Never mind. The problem was that I had Block comments enabled in 1Blocker. I disabled that and the edit summaries are back. --IngenieroLoco (talk) 11:11, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Range contributions for IPv6?

X!s Tools range contributions used to give range contributions for both IPv4 and IPv6 ranges, but the last few weeks it hasn't been doing IPv6 — I never get any results (even though I know of one or two edits from the range I'm asking about). Does anybody know of another tool? Or can I report the problem anywhere? I'm getting quite frustrated, and IPv6 vandals are getting away with murder. (Please don't tell me to use Phabricator, I can't handle that. I'm only a little old lady. Use words of one syllable.) Bishonen | talk 20:16, 22 April 2016 (UTC).

Sadly the author (or one of the authors) was blocked here, and therefore his RfC on Meta about abandoned tools is doomed. Here's a good place to report the issue. –Be..anyone 💩 20:34, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

@Bishonen: Are you sure it was X!'s tools which I seem to recall only ever handled IPv4. Someone pointed out that enabling the "Allow /16, /24 and /27 – /32 CIDR ranges on Special:Contributions forms..." gadget in preferences allowed a workaround where you can enter * to cover a range of IPv6 addresses. Does that work? I tried it once and it worked well, and I'll have another look if you like. Johnuniq (talk) 23:35, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

It's late for me, so I'm a bit blurry and request you bare that in mind if I'm missing the point, but just tried two IPv6 chosen randomly from recent changes. The first came up empty, but its only contribs were only minutes old. I tried another with contribs hours old, and the results came through. At the top of the tool's page, is a note stating "Caution: Replication lag is high, changes newer than [variable amount of time] may not be shown.". Could this be something to do with the problem you're having? fredgandt 00:14, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

I think I eventually got the range format correct (referring to mw:Help:Range blocks/IPv6#How to calculate an IPv6 CIDR range?), and sure enough, no results for ranges with edits that do get returned if adding the full IPv6. For a little old lady you're doing some very technical things!  fredgandt 00:50, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

I found 2605:A000:1200:600F:BDC2:282A:6C52:766B as an example. As you say, the full IP works, but 2605:A000:1200:600F:0:0:0:0/64 shows nothing. However, if scripting is enabled in the browser, and if the gadget I mentioned is enabled in Special:Preferences, the normal contribs page works after entering 2605:A000:1200:600F* Johnuniq (talk) 00:59, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

John, I do believe you're right. It was probably the prefs gadget that I used before, not X!'s tool. Sorry, confused little old lady. And then I probably repressed the gadget thing because it's so unfriendly and I'd so much rather use something simpler. (What does it even mean by talking about a "prefix", where's the prefix? Pre what?) Anyway. Yes, as you say, chopping off the IP you have after the first four groups and adding an asterisk works — after a fashion — it worked the second time I tried it with my own vandal, 2607:FB90:A048:8865:CE4C:BE49:E71E:EB4C — showing only the one princely contribution I already knew about, but still, that's working. The other suggested alternative, "enter a CIDR range", has never worked for me. Presumably it requires some exotic form of the range, such as what you get from the very frightening help page you linked to, Fred Gandt, and not the kind of barefoot range I know to make, without any multiplication etc, which is in this case 2607:FB90:A048:8865::/64. RexxS told me about that, and my programmer son (actually my great grandson… just kidding), and that form seems to work allright for blocking purposes. Sigh. Thank you, guys. I'll stumble on. Bishonen | talk 10:20, 23 April 2016 (UTC).

@Bishonen: You need a CIDR prefix like 2607:FB90:A048:8865::/64 when blocking a range, but such a CIDR prefix does not work in the Special:Contributions gadget for IPv6 (the gadget accepts CIDR prefixes for IPv4 only). I will update {{blockcalc}} so it produces links to IPv6 contributions as best it can, assuming the person using blockcalc has the gadget enabled. I'll let you know when/if I get it done (should be easy). Johnuniq (talk) 10:30, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: But where's the prefix? A prefix is something that goes before something. Does it have an extended definition in IT world — sometimes used to mean postfix or suffix, such as the "/64"? Of course it doesn't matter, it just confused me when the gadget talked like that. It would be great if you got the calculator to understand IPv6 ranges, thank you. ("Easy"? How can it be easy?) Bishonen | talk 10:54, 23 April 2016 (UTC).

@Bishonen: I know you're not really wanting a rant on CIDR but I can't resist something brief. Consider the IPv4 address 11.22.33.44. If that address and others nearby (say 11.22.33.49 and 11.22.33.56 and so on) needed to be blocked, you might block 11.22.33.0/24. That is called a prefix because it is the stuff at the front of each IP. The /24 indicates how many bits are in the prefix. Since an IPv4 address is 32 bits, a prefix of /24 means there are 8 bits remaining which have to be zero for a valid CIDR prefix. The remaining bits might be called the suffix but CIDR instead refers to the right-most 8 bits as the "host bits" because they identify a particular computer or "host" on a network. In this example, host number 44 is on network 11.22.33.0/24. Johnuniq (talk) 11:08, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

It's at times like this that my mind turns to pudding. I like pudding. fredgandt 12:06, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Johann Sebastian Bach

When I save an edit at Johann Sebastian Bach the page jumps around all weird, and I wondered if it was something that needs fixed. I asked about this at the help desk, where someone suggested it might be my internet connection, but mine's among the faster ones available, so I don't think the issue is on my end. Kirk Leonard (talk) 20:32, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

I very much think that it is the JavaScript for the {{listen}} templates kicking in one by one. It causes the enclosing boxes to expand and contract until they finally settle down. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:38, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

That's exactly what happens to me. Is there any fixing it, or is it just the way that template acts? Kirk Leonard (talk) 22:45, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

The template code is at Module:Listen but that is not going to be the whole story by a long way. There is JavaScript as well, which I cannot even begin to track down. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:50, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

The module's role in this is to create the file links; the effect itself happens whether you use the template or whether you include the file link manually. For example, [[File:Chromatic Fantasia (Bach BWV 903).ogg]] comes out like this:

It's easiest to see the effect if you edit this section and then click "Show preview". — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 00:13, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Just to provide another editor's experience; the only jump I see is a very minor reskinning of Chrome's default file GUI. The size and shapes of the two examples don't change, and the buffering .gif in the {{listen}} wrapper lasts only a second or so. I can imagine a slow connection being an issue, but would suggest that if the connection is not slow, another possible problem could be a bunged-up browser. If this is the case, rebooting it (close (not minimise) and reopen) might help. A bunged-up system can have similar slowing effects, and rebooting it could also help.

@Kirk Leonard: - what browser are you using (on what operating system can also sometimes matter)? fredgandt 11:56, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

It's a problem with the current player. It's part of the reason why i'm trying to replace it, which is an endeavor that I have already spent a year on. That whole part of the software had not been touched in 8 years, and it's a very challenging project to turn such old code around into a more modern extension, whilst not breaking existing stuff. Bottomline, it's not likely going to be fixed in this version of the player, but it's on the radar. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:03, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Server changeover - API delays - user contributions

Since yesterday's server changeover I've been suffering intermittent delays (of many seconds in some cases) when requesting lists of user contributions via the API – for instance when using Popups and hovering over a user's contribs entry in a page history (try it on this page's). The delays particularly affect accounts with many contribs. Until yesterday the lists always used to appear pretty much instantaneously. Is anyone else affected?  —SMALLJIM  15:33, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't know if it's related, but I'll pass your observation along. Thanks. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:23, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Whatamidoing (WMF). I've tried Popups on different PCs and using two different accounts, and also calling the API via a script, and I still get the same problem – a long delay the first time I call API:usercontribs on a user with a long contribs record. The delays are variable, but often more than 30 seconds. It doesn't happen on other API calls (API:Revisions is fine, for example). I can't see how this could be a problem at this end.

I note that since the changeover to the backup server, ClueBot NG has been up and down too – this may be related because I expect that bot would look up usercontribs via API too: I reported this here. I'd expect it to affect Huggle and other AV tools too.

Will someone else check to see if they see the same delays please (try Popups, see above); if it's not just me this may indicate something that needs fixing on the new server. And if it is just me, then...why?! Thanks.  —SMALLJIM  10:00, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

I get a probably related issue when I refresh my watchlist: "Changes newer than 13 seconds may not appear in this list." The last time I saw such a message here is years ago. Fram (talk) 10:07, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

I get that every few weeks. 13 seconds is insignificant; delays like these are nothing to worry about until they exceed 10-20 minutes. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:36, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure that would be related, Fram & Redrose64. API delays of a few seconds can be pretty disastrous. Anyway, as of now it's back to responding almost instantaneously, so thanks to whoever fixed it :)  —SMALLJIM  15:57, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I see we've been transferred back to the old server (I really shouldn't leave the computer and have a life!). So whatever was causing the delays may not have been fixed after all.  —SMALLJIM  16:05, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@Smalljim - Could you provide the full URL/API call options where you had the issues and the exact times in UTC at which those happened? There are 2 possibilities here- some calls are known to be more expensive than others, and workarounds on the new servers may not yet exist on the current ones. Another possibility is that it is a transitional problem- as this was the first time the new databases were used, despite the efforts to warmup the database, more rows than usual may have to be read from disk, which, combined with more than usual stress, they can lead to more error rates than usual. Time fixes the second option, but the first must be researched. If you could provide the full URL and the time, we will be able to improve the performance of those calls and hopefully fix them. Thank you. --jynus (talk) 10:45, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

@Jynus and Whatamidoing (WMF): I think it's a shame that no-one else here was able to take a minute to check if they were also affected. I can't provide the level of detail that you request, but I know that I used Popups to look up the contribs of numerous recent editors of this page (including myself) around the time that I made the above reports. Further checks on the same editor made soon after the first were typically much faster, but after some time (or additional edits made?) were slow again. It may be worth talking to User:DamianZaremba, because ClueBot NG was clearly unhappy running through the backup server too (see User talk:DamianZaremba).  —SMALLJIM  15:33, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Going back again

It's server transfer again, but this time around it's going to be a lot more overloaded, as not only MediaWiki will be returning from Dallas, but also everything else that went ahead of it—all to go side by side. I'm rather anxious, as I'm expecting a longer transfer this time around. (Will it?) I'm not also exactly sure whether the technical staff has done anything about Tuesday's issues, or if they will work on them after the transfer. IRC looks rather too technical to non-programmers like me, but I'll try to take another look there. 49.148.27.180 (talk) 13:15, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Today's transfer took much faster, around 20 minutes to be precise. I also like the banner on technical maintenance, but it seems like it's appearing even after it's done. I think I thought too much on the transfer time. 49.148.27.180 (talk) 14:25, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

They actually were talking about a plan that would be slower, but which might reduce a couple of cacheing problems and maybe Special:RecentChanges. But it looks like they found faster ways to address those problems.

The banners get turned off manually, so we expect them to run for a few minutes longer than necessary. I'm glad that you liked them. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:04, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

My comment messed up the chronology of the Talk Page at the "Gottlob Frege" article

Sry! T 88.89.219.147 (talk) 04:36, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

And the same on the "Truth" article Talk Page - sry sry sry! T 88.89.219.147 (talk) 05:15, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I assume you're talking about the fact that there were some references below your comments. That is because there were ref tags on the page but no reference list template, so MediaWiki placed the refsat the bottom of the page, below your comments. I've added {{reflist talk}} in appropriate places to both the talk pages you've referred to. Graham87 06:15, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Thx a lot :) T 88.89.219.147 (talk) 06:21, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

User creation entry missing

Neither Special:Log/Kjell3 nor https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=User%3AKjell3 say anything about the account Kjell3 being created. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 14:39, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

GeoffreyT2000, the account Kjell3 was renamed as part of the SUL finalization process to User:Kjell3~enwiki (log entry). This account in turn was globally renamed to User:Kjellejk (log). You can see the original log entry in the log for User:Kjellejk. Relentlessly (talk) 16:51, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

What you see at User:Kjell3 is actually a transclusion of meta:User:Kjell3. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:55, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Restoring previous protection

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T41038

India national cricket team was indefinitely semiprotected in 2009. I've just now fully protected it because of an edit-war, but once the full protection expires in a few days, the software won't automatically restore the semiprotection. Perhaps a good thing in this specific situation; we can see whether the end of semiprotection will result in more vandalism, or not. Is there any tool that tracks situations in which temporary full protection of an indef-semiprotected page causes all protection to end? Some time ago, I suggested that we have a bot to remind admins to restore semiprotection if they thought it necessary, but I don't think that went anywhere. Nyttend (talk) 13:17, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Assuming the page is on your watchlist, you should get a watchlist entry detailing the protection change - right? If so, and also assuming that you have an epic watchlist, a script could alert you when specific changes occur i.e. use the API to keep tabs on a special user defined list of watched pages such that when they change, you get an almost instant heads up. If anything I just said makes sense, I can add it to my list of things to do. Currently sleepy. fredgandt 18:17, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Previous protection states are not remembered, although they are logged. For articles that exist, there are two actions that can be protected - edit and move; and each of these two can have any one of five protection levels (none, semi, 30/500, template, full) set for it, they don't need to be the same for both. Any protection level (other than "none") can be either indefinite, or be given an expiry time. When that expiry time is reached, the prot level drops right back to "none", regardless of the prot history. So, if an article has indef semi prot for editing, and is then changed to have a fixed-duration full prot (for editing), then when the expiry is reached it doesn't return to semi-protected but becomes unprotected (for editing). I'm sure this has come up at VPT before, if so, there may be a phab: ticket for it. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:02, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: - Would you like a User Script that reminds the user when temporary protections they've added are about to expire? A stop-gap measure, but probably helpful. fredgandt 23:30, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

By "any tool", I was envisioning either a private user script or a more generally used feature (a bot, perhaps?) that lots pages that are about to become unprotected because of a modification in protection state. It would be slightly useful to me (not hugely, because I don't do much with page protection), but I can envision it being lots more significant to folks who hang out at WP:RFPP all the time. Nyttend (talk) 04:03, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I'll put something together, and ping you to try it out when done. I think though you're right, that blanket usefulness for all would need to be built in to the core or bot driven. Aren't there already bot(s) clearing up protection tags after expiration? If my memory serves me correctly this time, that/those bot(s) could be tasked quite trivially to do the messaging as they go. fredgandt 09:01, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal: - could MusikBot do this? fredgandt 09:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

@Fred Gandt: There are at least four such bots (including Cyberbot II (talk · contribs), DumbBOT (talk · contribs), Lowercase sigmabot (talk · contribs) and MusikBot (talk · contribs), possibly others), although none of them are comprehensive, and some have periods of outage.

I also forgot to mention Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 136#Page protection - reverting to previous protection when a higher form expires and phab:T41038. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:47, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Interesting Redrose64, thanks. I may join in that phab; it looks like they're over thinking it. fredgandt 12:08, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I could definitely have MusikBot check if full protection had been lifted, and if so, restore any previous semi protection with the original expiry. However this obviously requires the admin bit, and especially something powerful like page protection probably isn't going to be well-received by the community. We'd need broad consensus for this, but if you can achieve it, I'm happy to do the coding. As for comprehensiveness, MusikBot goes off of Category:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates. So it's true that if someone else, or another bot, removes the protection template first, then MusikBot will have no notion of it and won't know to restore semi. I guess I'd need to write a new task altogether to go off of the logs rather than the category. That's how Lowercase sigmabot (talk · contribs) worked, I believe. Anyway I'd be willing to do that extra work too, provided we have the community backing the effort — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:51, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

This sounds like something people would grow to depend on, so I think it would be better relegated to an extension or to core (I think the best way would be to allow multiple protection entries on the same page at a time, admins could edit on, or add an additional one - that way they can have independent expiration). Then a bot could be used to provide a report of parameters that aren't provided for in the core; such as applying multiple indefinite protections, or an indefinite greater protection over a lower definite one. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:36, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

xaosflux - although that sounds like the technically prefered method (stacking rather than replacing), the issue of which has a higher level is brought up on the phab Redrose linked. There's a problem deciding which of the current and potentially future levels is actually higher than which others. For the highest level to take precedence over any others present, that issue would need to be resolved first.

As I said though, I think that's (without great change) over thinking it, and as MusikAnimal suggests, simply replacing any immediately preceding prots that were due to still be in effect when a prot is lifted is relatively trivial - just a case of parsing some dates. The admin bit would be needed for reinstantiation of prots, but messaging (akin to what AnomieBOT does for edit requests, or more directly on admin talk pages) wouldn't require any additional privileges, and surely wouldn't be considered controversial? fredgandt 16:56, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Sure, messaging the protecting admin is a good start and indeed would attract little opposition. I can tag that on to the current and stable implementation of going off of the maintenance category. At a later time we can look into going off of the logs when we see the idea gains more traction. If we could get the OK from several admins regularly working in this area, I think that'd satisfy the necessary consensus. What do you think Xaosflux? I can also add an "opt-out" page, in the event the admin wishes not to be contacted in this way — MusikAnimal ^talk 17:17, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I think we should workshop out the use cases especially for "lowering" actions - for example if I come a cross a page that is full protected with a year left on it, and and reduce it semi for 6 months - when that expired I wouldn't want some bot adding a 6 month full protection afterwords. Also, bots break - so anyone temporarily changing a protection would still need to check up on their actions. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:45, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I think there are two distinct cases of prot change that can be discerned and handled uniquely. In one case, a prot may be replaced by another, whilst in another the prot may be removed and in its place another be placed. From the bot's perspective, the first case would be an instance worthy of note, but second could be ignored, and the difference wouldn't be in the expirations, it'd be in the actions. As long as admin got into the habit of always removing prots before adding the new one if the old one shouldn't be reengaged after the new one expires, shouldn't that cover it?

Human attention should never be underestimated

I suggest that (should this go ahead) the bot maintains a page chronologically listing the recently expired (where the action prior to the one that just expired was the addition of a prot) through to soon due to expire and on to due to expire in the next couple of days, so that all the admin can keep an eye on it. I think that would be most efficient - to share the load, rather than individual targeted messaging. fredgandt 23:05, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

(←) My thoughts were to handle the single use-case of reminding admins that the full protection they added has expired, and that the previous semi or 30/500 period would otherwise still be in place. Any other scenario seems counterintuitive to me. The bot would provide the type and datestamp of the previous protection, and a link to protect the page with those settings. Whether or not the admin wants to do anything about it is up to them. This certainly would be helpful for me, as I fully-protect pages often due to edit wars, and days will go by before I remember to check or someone reports to RFPP about the ongoing anon disruption — MusikAnimal ^talk 02:15, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Twinkle error at CFD

Any idea why Twinkle is giving me a "failed to find target" when I attempt to make a CFD entry? I haven't seen one of those errors in ages. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 20:50, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

@TenPoundHammer: I've removed a space from the end of Twinkle's hidden comment at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy. See if that helps. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:25, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Ping fails on some names

Check out the posts here. Note that the ping is redlined. Why? That does seem to be the user's name. I have noticed this before, is it due to the space? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:29, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

It's because the user has not created a user page. Click the link, it will tell you that the page does not exist. --Elektrik Fanne 13:31, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The notification should work regardless of whether or not the user page exists, though. SiBr₄ (talk) 13:36, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The notification did indeed work. --Elektrik Fanne 13:51, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

It appears I am being wikihounded by a faux new user. Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:59, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

You ask a question here and then complain when it gets answered? 85.255.232.121 (talk) 14:45, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Server switch 2016

➤ To read this in other languages, see m:Tech/Server switch 2016.

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its newest data center in Dallas. This will make sure Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the new data center on Tuesday, 19 April.
On Thursday, 21 April, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be a code freeze for the week of 18 April. No non-essential code deployments will take place.

This test was originally planned to take place on March 22. April 19th and 21st are the new dates. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. They will post any changes on that schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Translation for NZ readers: You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 20 April and Friday, 22 April, starting at 02:00 NZST. Akld guy (talk) 01:20, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Your comment seems more likely to confuse than help readers. Many may not realize NZ refers to New Zealand and NZST is New Zealand Standard Time. There must be relatively few editors in that time zone and most of them are probably aware they are in an unusual time zone for Wikipedia and sometimes need to change the date/day when converting UTC times to New Zealand time. For the large majority of editors it takes place Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April in their local time zone. Your earlier objection to including day of the week in UTC announcements got no support. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:10, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Your comments come across as snarky and argumentative. NZ readers will immediately realize what NZ and NZST refer to. The translation is directed to nobody else, so why comment? Akld guy (talk) 02:36, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Non-NZ readers will not know the post is not directed to them if they don't know what NZ refers to. And NZ readers who are helped by the comment are probably so rare it isn't worth the time everybody else spend reading the comment. Using UTC time is standard in Wikipedia and I hope people don't start posting replies just to convert to other time zones. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:58, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

But they already did. In case you didn't notice, Whatamidoing converted it to BST, CEST, EDT, and PDT. So all I did was convert the time for NZ readers too. Why pick out my post as likely to be misleading? Are readers not also just as likely to misinterpret Whatamidoing's conversions, or is this something personal? Akld guy (talk) 03:27, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Continued on your talk page. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:18, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Barely anyone in that country would even notice what happened. Most people there would have been asleep that time. 49.148.29.21 (talk) 00:46, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

I should have included a link to http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20160419T14 with this message. That provides a translation to any time zone. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I just went to edit a page, and realized that the "Edit" button for VisualEditor is missing. It still gives me the "Edit Source" button, which seems to work fine. Is that related to this whole issue? Because I don't find anything else about it, and the timing seems coincidental. AnnaGoFast (talk) 00:22, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

That's the mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, scroll halfway down to "Editing mode", and pick whichever you want. At a guess, your prefs are probably set to "Always give me the source editor" right now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Not exactly; I checked, and it was set to "Remember last editor", so I changed it to "Show both edit tabs". I don't understand why it changed all of a sudden like that though; it's never done that in the several months I've been around, and I've used both Visual and Source editing during that time. And I'm not sure what "remember last editor" even means, or why it would make the Visual editor disappear. Oh well, fixed now. Thanks for your help. AnnaGoFast (talk) 01:13, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

It's a new feature, for the benefit of editors who only want one Edit tab. Like you, I prefer two, but we are apparently the minority. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Not getting email-confirmation emails

Sometime in the past year or so, all my Wikimedia accounts, including en:WP, have been flagged to request email confirmation, despite having long ago done this. I've tried a number of times to re-send the email confirmation code (on several sites), but I've not received any. They're supposed to be going to an email I've had since before WP existed, and at which I receive 30-60 messages a day. (I also check every single email tagged as spam). The "Confirm email address" page doesn't say what to do if one never gets any messages. Who should I talk to about getting this fixed? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:43, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Yahoo ? There's been known to be some trouble with that email provider. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:19, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

If not Yahoo, perhaps related to phab:T130367 (both reports are using gmail). I just tested a gmail address and it worked ok, so that's not the central issue. Have you checked the Trash folder, in case there's a filter that's mis-filing things before they even hit the Spam folder? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Upload Wizard

Hi,

I've been using the File Upload Wizard to upload files to Wikipedia, but it only allows me to upload files one by one, whereas the Upload Wizard on Commons allows me to set the information for multiple files and then upload them all without having to reload the page. The Commons wizard is thus much easier to use; is there any way that could be replicated here on WP? --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 20:41, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Drumpfinator extension for chrome and unintentional vandalism

Not sure if this should go here. It's not a technical problem--a heads up really. John Oliver popularized a chrome extensions which changes Trump to Drumpf if viewed on a website. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/drumpfinator/hcimhbfpiofdihhdnofbdlhjcmjopilp?hl=en I made the mistake of having this on while I asked a question on the main help desk page. Evidently when I clicked "edit source" Drumpf was brought in rather than Trump because that was what my browser was displaying at the time. Oops. I have since removed the extension. — Preceding unsigned comment added by AugusteBlanqui (talk • contribs) 09:56, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

I've come across this, and there has been an ANI thread about it. The scary thing is that Trump is changed to Drumpf on the entire page you're innocently editing. The whole of ANI, for instance. Bishonen | talk 20:16, 22 April 2016 (UTC).

Haha, I once accidentally did the same thing myself! --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 20:48, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

User stats - last edit

I can use tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-ec/?user= to get the last edit date done by a user but it also dumps a bag of other stuff. Is there a way of giving a tool a list of users and getting just the corresponding last edit date, either a list or one at a time does not matter ? (I am thinking of reinvigorating a project, with a couple of hundred "registered" participants but even the lead coordinator formally retired as a Wikipedian over 12 months ago and the project page has not been updated accordingly and many others seem to have not edited at all anywhere for one or more years, so it would be good to be able to easily see who was still around.) Aoziwe (talk) 13:35, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Give me a list of user names, or point to place, where I can find them. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:06, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Here - Wikipedia:WikiProject Law Enforcement#Participants and here - Wikipedia:WikiProject Law Enforcement/Participants. Thanks in advance. Aoziwe (talk) 12:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like you want my useractivity tool. — Dispenser 14:40, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks I will look at that too. Aoziwe (talk) 12:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Looks good. Thanks. Is it written in python? Any chance of seeing the source ? Aoziwe (talk) 12:32, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

[55], but generally just ask for any specific features. — Dispenser 04:48, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

You might also be interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Astronomical objects (or equivalent for the project you're interested in). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:27, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks I will look at that too. Not quite the exact same thing but will probably be very useful if I get the project going again well. Aoziwe (talk) 12:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Looks very useful too. How does the bot know which page to load the list of users into ? It looks like the opt out page is shared by all projects/user list loads ? Aoziwe (talk) 11:13, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

That's probably a question for User:Harej. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:50, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing and Aoziwe: It compiles the list of active WikiProject participants based on whoever edited the project's page/talk page/subpage twice in the last 90 days. As for subject area, it is based on making five or more edits to a relevant article or its talk page in the last 30 days. "Relevant" is based on the article's talk page being tagged by that WikiProject. Of note, when you opt out, you are removed from all of these WikiProject Directory lists, and don't count toward the total count. Harej (talk) 03:09, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Article title with unusual character?

There appears to be an unusual character in the title of the article Εrina language (which is currently up for speedy deletion). Compare that page to the already-deleted Erina language. I'm guessing that the article creator put a character into the former article title that looks like a letter of the English alphabet, but isn't. Yet I can't figure out what character is different. Even zooming in to 200%, I can't see the difference. Can anyone advise as to what the different character is, and whether there is a good way to identify such characters? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 00:33, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

%CE%95rina_language vs. Erina_language can be established using {{urlencode:string|WIKI}}. See mw:Help:Magic words#URL data for more info. fredgandt 00:39, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142#2 articles with the same name ?. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:34, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

See also Εrinα_language — xaosflux ^Talk 03:41, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The easiest way to find such characters:

Copy the article page's web address (URL) from your browser's address bar and paste it back into the address bar (or to a text editor or other text area). At least with Firefox and Google Chrome (with Safari on my old Mac, you have to drag the favicon instead, which is equally easy), the copied text will have "unusual" characters represented as sequences of two to four percent-encoded bytes, such as %CE%95, which are easy to spot.

You can usually find out more about a strange character by copying the character itself and pasting it into the Wikipedia search field: Here's the redirect page for the character Ε. --Pipetricker (talk) 17:56, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Erina language. We have a persistent disrupter on our hands. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:11, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks for the suggestions. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:18, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Appearance: How to indicate a link is a redirect?

Polish Wikipedia by default colors all redirects green, just like on all Wikipedias links that were clicked previously have a darker shade, and red links are, well, red. I cannot find an option to trigger green coloring of redirects in preferences/gadgets. Anyone knows where it is hidden, or where can I find a related script? If you reply here, please WP:ECHO me. Thanks! --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:11, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@Piotrus: put this piece here or if you want this globally (in all WMF projects), then here:

a.mw-redirect {color: green !important;}

--Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:19, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

I find it really irritating to have all redirect links decorated differently because there are so many and most aren't a problem. I therefore have them only showing up on edit preview:

.action-submit .mw-redirect {text-decoration: underline wavy green;}

I also colour all disambiguation links with different underlines all the time, as they almost always need fixing. Relentlessly (talk) 07:22, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@Piotrus: There’s also User:Anomie/linkclassifier which recolours links to redirects, dab pages and many other things.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 07:32, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you guys, the script pointed out by User:Edgars2007 does what I want perfectly. Anomie's script looks more powerful, but can anyone comment on whether it has issues like delays page loading (ping back User:JohnBlackburne)? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:37, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Not noticeably no, it seems quite lightweight (and I do notice these things). Your experience may be different but it’s easy enough to install and try out.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 07:40, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Deletion timeout on File:To Commons.svg

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T133525

I just tried to delete the local copy of File:To Commons.svg per Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files/2016 March 8#File:To Commons.svg but got a "Database error: To avoid creating high replication lag, this transaction was aborted because the write duration (27.841500759125) exceeded the 6 seconds limit. If you are changing many items at once, try doing multiple smaller operations instead.", presumably due to the number of usages this file has. Just to confirm, should I be bugging the sysadmins about this? MER-C 07:08, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

• Possibly, but try again first before you do. That's happened to me once in the past and it worked properly the second time. BethNaught (talk) 07:17, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Nope, no luck. I'll file the Phabricator ticket. Thanks anyway. MER-C 10:36, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
    • Curious to see what would happen, I restored all deleted revisions (I'd deleted it under F2 a few years ago) and then deleted everything. All went ideally. I then selected all revisions that weren't deleted before today, told it to undelete them, and after virtually no wait time, I was given a message in red text:

      Errors were encountered while undeleting the file: The file "mwstore://local-multiwrite/local-deleted/k/6/2/k62p57azqte5g5k7yr19mduow3kzak2.svg" is in an inconsistent state within the internal storage backends
      
      The file "mwstore://local-multiwrite/local-public/7/78/To_Commons.svg" is in an inconsistent state within the internal storage backends

      Never seen this before. Any idea what happened? Presumably it's related to the first problem, but I don't understand it at all. Nyttend (talk) 18:43, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
      • For some reason, the file File:To Commons.svg was broken earlier today when I checked the file information page. Most pages currently use File:To Commons TEMP.svg because of recent edits to {{Copy to Wikimedia Commons}}. MER-C changed the file name at one place in the template, and then I changed the file name at another place in the template when I saw that the image was broken on file information pages. The normal file name File:To Commons.svg seems to work again, so unless there are other things to do first, the file name change should be reverted in the template. --Stefan2 (talk) 19:27, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

  It's some kind of server side issue that has tripped up a number of file deletions recently. Not the same issue as the one MER-C was having but it's been reported in Phabricator.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:49, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

  Local version deleted and template hack reverted. Thanks everyone. MER-C 12:14, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Template styles

Hey all.

So, since the Jerusalem Hackathon I've been working on a very very longstanding issue we have had with styles. The current WIP solution: template styles.

That new feature allows attaching proper CSS to templates, finally getting rid of limited and troublesome inline styles in elements of the page. The upsides:

• No redundancy: If you use a style on more than an element, simply place them all in the same class and share styles;
• Even less redundancy: if you have a family of templates sharing styles, you can put all the styles in the one "library" template and include that;
• Proper style sheets means support for @media blocks, finally (thus making it possible for styles to work right on mobile, amongst other things);
• Smaller and easier to maintain templates;
• Style sheets becomes available to anyone being able to edit the template, rather than just admins; and
• No more need to edit common.css and have to deal with the crap of caching, or the risk of breaking the site.

The downsides... well, I can't think of any yet but I'm sure we'll find some eventually.  :-)

There is a test wiki in Labs where the current WIP extension is deployed. Feel free to register (not with your real Wikimedia credentials!) and play with it. Beware that this is my testing ground and thus may randomly be unstable. The main page there is a transcluded template with styles if you want a quick and easy example to look at. There is no documentation (yet) but the jist of it is simple: add a ...</templatestyles> element to a template containing a style sheet, and that style will be prepended to any page that transcludes that template (just once, even if the template is transcluded multiple times, including recursively). Not unlike TemplateData, you can actually put the templatestyles element on a subpage - but I expect that would be a bad idea in this case since it affects transclusions and thus should track the template's own protection level.

This pet project of mine has a lot of buy-in and support from the WMF (tracked in phabricator at T483) so once we're happy about how it works I've no doubt it will end up being deployed in production fairly quickly. — Coren ^(talk) 15:05, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Sweeeeet! Hope this gets deployed soon, so we can properly style the Main Page. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:52, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Extreme enthusiasm \m/ =) \m/  fredgandt 16:46, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Best thing EVAH ! Will take us 5 years to get rid of the existing cruft I'm sure, but this will be awesome. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:56, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, this looks very good. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:57, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

FYI, I experimented with this using the Wide image template. {{Wide image}}. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:58, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Wonderful! Sounds like an awesome change. Kudos to you for implementing/coming up with this. APerson (talk!) 02:35, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

I have only one thing to say: Lua Lua Lua.

This would be better if it came with a lua library that would allow adding such styles without a hacky extensiontag:

frame:extensionTag{ name = 'templatestyles', content = 'some text', args = { name = 'foo', group = 'bar' } }

Potentially something like mw.templatestyles or mw.styles or mw.html.styles. This would make the conversion of existing modules much more efficient. 08:28, 21 April 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.89.56 (talk)

That sounds like a nice enhancement I think, but not necessarily a requirement. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

One limitation of the styles in templates is that each page needs to be edited to add them. I think that this is a severe limitation, and would require unnecessarily editing thousands of pages just to add a template to it, even for the smallest tweak. There are possible ways to overcome this. 197.218.81.82 (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I counter that by saying that styling and page structure will no longer accidentally go out of sync. And not every page needs to be edited, just purged, which the queue does already for your template change. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Expanding the use to categories

Instead of adding these to only templates, a more generic tag could be created, e.g. <styles> or <wikistyles> (to avoid possible clashes with HTml) and when they are added them to the Category page they apply to all pages within it. 197.218.81.82 (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. It means that a category would have to purge every single page within it after someone edited the category page. That mixes the models of templates and categories. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

A shadow css for each page

For example, Cat/theme.css or //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme:Cat.css 197.218.81.82 (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

This has been proposed before, but it complicates purging, dependency tracking, parsoid and a host of other things (just like Categories). It has been considered, but was rejected. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Also, something not mentioned here, is if two templates contain contradictory styles which one will win. Another question is how VE will interact with it because it doesn't have a preview so if someone removes a template and adds another with styles it would need to update the styling of the page content in the editor. 197.218.81.82 (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Conflicts are possible indeed, but the effects are at limited to the pages that the templates are transcluded on. I personally am not not afraid of it. If we find people often apply their rules to all divs, we could expand the validator to always require people start their rule with a classname or something like that. Solvable problems I think. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

My edit is not mentioned in the article history

Not sure whether to treat this for a bug - it is a minor inconvenience anyway. Still I thought I'd mention it as there could be room for improvement. I performed a minor edit to the article Aeroprakt A-32 Vixxen, changing "sped" to "speed" and "woulded" to "moulded". Thse modifications are reflected in the article - and that's what counts! - but are not visible in the article history. Neither does the edit show in the list of my "contributions". Mentioned for what it is worth... Thanks for taking care. Jan olieslagers (talk) 12:54, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Editor Ahunt made those edits in these changes. If you were trying to do the same thing at the same time and he saved first, your duplicate edits are ignored by the system. --David Biddulph (talk) 12:59, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The changes were made by somebody else.[56] This is probably what happened: You clicked edit before the changes so you saw the old version in the edit box, but you saved after the other editor had already saved the same changes. That meant your edit made no change and became a null edit. Users are not informed of this but just see the previously saved article and assume they did it themselves. Null edits are not registered anywhere. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:02, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Pffieuw! Talking of a quick reaction! A clear explanation, too. If anything, it teaches me to type faster :) Many thanks! Jan olieslagers (talk) 13:04, 27 April 2016 (UTC)