User talk:Martijn Hoekstra/Archives/2014/October

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Consensus

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The Signpost: 01 October 2014

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Requests for page protection

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VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014

Did you know?

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

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

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

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

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

Increased support for devices and browsers

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

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

TemplateData editor

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

Other changes

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

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

Supporting your wiki

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

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

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

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

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

The Signpost: 08 October 2014

Please comment on Talk:Israel

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The Signpost: 15 October 2014

Please comment on Template talk:Track listing

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Please comment on Talk:Traditional marriage

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The Signpost: 22 October 2014

Re: (User talk:ais523) Too much?

I'm actually increasingly of the opinion that we need two templates here. The new {{quote}} can be created without any sort of crazy custom styling, without being boxed. {{quote|box=true}}, meanwhile, is much harder to get looking good with standard site styling; it needs a lot of hacks (because {{quotation}} has a lot of hacks). The extra internal padding is definitely needed in the non-mobile view, but I'd love it if there were a better option than the one currently used.

For what it's worth, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ais523/quotes looks much better with {{quote/Sandbox|box=true}} than it does with {{quotation}}; {{quotation}} is plainly just broken even in simple cases, whereas {{quote/Sandbox|box=true}} looks pretty good (although it has no box). So I think what's happened is that we've got a template that's better than the existing ones in every way, but that doesn't mean that it's perfect, and further improvements would be better still. (For instance, perhaps we should get a policy-quote or whatever class added to the site CSS.) Part of the reason I made my changes in multiple edits was so that it would be easier to revert potentially undesirable changes while keeping the more clearly desirable ones. --ais523 16:52, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

{{quotation}} is a mess. I agree with you that a little padding may go a long way - 5px all around or something? I wonder if we use the same padding for boxed and non-boxed (that is, is there a sweetspot where both look good, maybe subtract a little margin and add a little padding). If you need anything on site.css - even for testing - let me know, and I'll set it up for you. If you need some more leeway, you could use https://test.wikipedia.org though site.css may be different there. Getting admin there usually involves asking on #wikitech irc if someone could make you admin for some testing and stuff - unless you want to go the long way around at https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests/Permissions , then it can sometimes take up to a couple of days. It was the padding that threw mobile off by the way - and I'm not sure if moving the padding out of the inline style would help at all. It definitely needs testing on mobile as well as desktop - but I'm fairly sure we can end up with a boxed and a non-boxed version that a. look good, for all test cases b. share all code except a single class and c. work on mobile. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 17:15, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
The following styling seems to work (tested on my vector.css and monobook.css):
blockquote.templatequote.toccolours { padding:1.3em 1.5em 1.5em 1.5em;}
.templatequote.toccolours div.templatequotecite { text-align:right; }
I think the default appearance looks just fine on mobile (basically the toccolours is just ignored), so no extra CSS is needed there. My main reservation is to do with the top padding (the 1.3em value above); it looks a little too large even at 1.3em, but I'm not sure if I can get it exactly right for all situations (it probably depends on the text we're quoting). I've reverted the template back to a simple version so that we can do this all through CSS. --ais523 18:03, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
I think (though I'm not sure) things in skinname.css won't be picked up by mobile, but once they are in common.css, they will be. in line css is stripped on mobile in all cases, so we're not done testing just yet. @Jdlrobson:, are you free to provide us with the truth(tm)? (sorry for attempting to make you my personal library) Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 18:27, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Martijn Hoekstra you are correct. MediaWiki:Common.css or MediaWiki::vector.css will not load on mobile. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jdlrobson (talk • contribs) 22:05, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
@Ais523: At the fear of breaking everything and making the sky fall and stuff like that, would the classes suffixed with test work for you for now? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 19:02, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
If there's some suspicion that the mobile CSS might not behave correctly on user subpages (and I already have some suspicion of that), we might have to. The best method is probably to do it on testwiki rather than here on enwiki (changing site CSS for such a widely-used site just to debug one template is crazy, just in case it does break things), and to copy the entire existing styling as well as the new styling, with _test suffixes on everything, so that it's as close as possible to the "installed" version. Ideally, we'd have a reliable way of saying "this is not for mobile", but I don't know if there is one. --ais523 19:30, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Just to be sure, I'll copy everything over to test. We don't need test suffixes there, really, because if everything breaks, we don't spill it over to millions of readers. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 19:38, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Martijn_Hoekstra/quotetest is up. You could check if you can edit common.css on test directly. It's quite possible that's actually open to editing. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 19:49, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
I noticed you'd edited common.css, and imported myself: https://test.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ais523/quotes. It looks good in Vector, Monobook, and mobile even when using site CSS (which I don't have write access to). Unless there's another bug found in the family of templates, we might be good to go with this one. --ais523 19:59, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
I've moved the inline-block style into common.css as well on test.wiki. Note that this breaks {{quote}} as it exists now, so if we are going to convert, we need to change quote and commons.css at the same time - and it will cause some temporary breakage while it is still in browser caches. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 10:07, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks much

Thanks for the user talk page help. :) — Cirt (talk) 16:03, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Not to mention the unreasonable amounts of good faith :) You're welcome! Martijn Hoekstra (talk)

G13 Eligibility

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/ArangoDB has become eligible for G13. HasteurBot (talk) 01:30, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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