Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 130

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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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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Progress template

I am trying to implement a merger of Category:Category needed to Category:Uncategorized pages (see CFD Aug 7). The former was previously a parent of the latter, and used to hold all pages which are also in the latter's sub-cats by month. Now, having moved the pages down, I can't figure out how to stop the progress template Template:Categorization progress from double-counting all the pages.

I tried using an additional parameter as described at Template:Progress box, without success. Do I need to set up a separate "Category:All uncategorized pages", along the lines of Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability which seems to work for Template:Notability progress? – Fayenatic London 21:39, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Have you removed Category:Uncategorized pages from all those pages? If so, then it may be part of a recurring problem with how category counts get tracked for categories with more than 200 articles (the software tries to keep track instead of recounting, but it misses some removals and additions, especially when they get added at once by a template), which has had an unresolved bugzilla report for something like eight years. Van Isaac_WS^cont 22:15, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Aha. I have not edited the pages individually, but I edited {{Uncategorized}} which is transcluded onto them all. Sounds like that could be it, then. – Fayenatic London 22:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

@Fayenatic london: Your edit to {{Uncategorized}} didn't remove Category:Uncategorized pages from all the pages, which is why you're seeing the double count and also why AnomieBOT is going to be sending me a large email in about an hour complaining that it can't find any templates to date in all those articles to get them to move from Category:Uncategorized pages to its dated subcategories.

The CFD is based on a faulty premise, which stems from non-standard category naming possibly combined with an unusual category structure. The way dated maintenance categories work is described at Wikipedia:Creating a dated maintenance category, but in short each template has an "all" category that holds every page with the maintenance issue (which must not be a subcategory of Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month), a "base" category that holds only those pages that have the tag without a date (and which must be a subcategory of Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month), and then "dated" categories that are subcategories of the "base" category. Before the CfD, it seems that Category:Uncategorized pages was the "all" category and Category:Category needed was the "base" category; now that you've tried to merge these two, it has broken things.

To fix this, you will need to create a "Category:All uncategorized pages", and the effective outcome of the CfD will be that Category:Uncategorized pages was renamed to Category:All uncategorized pages and Category:Category needed was renamed to Category:Uncategorized pages. Or you could just undo everything and re-close the CfD as "rejected for technical reasons", and maybe clean up the structure and the naming in a more straightforward manner. Anomie ⚔ 23:19, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Note of course that the "all" categories are an unnecessary complexity that were retained for political reasons. Possibly it is now time they went. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:04, 1 September 2014 (UTC).

Thanks, Anomie. I have set up that category. The CfD was more worthwhile than you suggest. It was Category:Category needed which was the "all pages" category before, but it also held Category:Articles needing additional categories. "Category needed" was described on some pages as being for articles as opposed to pages. Most other wikis only have one category or the other. If anyone would like to instigate merger of the equivalent categories on Arabic and Farsi wikis, then the two Wikidata items can be merged. – Fayenatic London 07:59, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@Anomie: can I safely delete Category:Uncategorized pages from September 2014, as an unnecessary duplicate of Category:Uncategorized from September 2014? It was created by AnomieBOT at 14:53 yesterday, probably after one of my half-baked edits to a template or parent category. Also, have I put things right so that AnomieBOT will set up matching categories in future? I am wondering whether the inconsistency between the monthly categories called "uncategorized", and the others called "uncategorized pages", is still a problem. Note that the monthly instruction template is at Template:Monthly clean-up category/Messages/Uncategorized. – Fayenatic London 13:52, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

For the moment, I've temporarily categoryredirected that to the correctly named category, so that we can avoid its accidental recreation while we get whatever caused that to happen fixed. Bearcat (talk) 18:39, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I fixed the bot this morning after I realized it would need fixing, but I didn't think to check that the category hadn't already been created. I've just deleted it, and if it gets recreated please let me know so I can see what I screwed up. It would be nice if the monthly categories were "Category:Uncategorized pages from MONTH YEAR" so the bot wouldn't need a special case, but it's not a big deal as far as the bot goes. Anomie ⚔ 20:00, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I wanted to note, for the record, that this change also appears to have borked the categorization project's tools. The Untagged Uncategorized Articles toolserver is now no longer able to distinguish whether articles are tagged or not, and has thus picked back up every uncategorized article regardless of its tag status — on today's list generation it has over 1,600 articles on it, but about 1,200 of those are already tagged.

I have alerted User:JaGa, the toolserver bot's maintainer, to look into the issue and recode the bot for the new structure if possible, and a temporary workaround does exist of manually doing an AWB comparison between the list and the contents of Category:All uncategorized pages before actually starting a tagging run, but this cannot and will not become a permanent part of the process. So if JaGa isn't able to fix the problem, things will have to be put back the way they were before — because this issue, while temporarily workaroundable, is not acceptable in the long term and will not be tolerated as a permanent "new normal". I am reasonably confident that it will be fairly easily fixable, though — but this kind of unintended consequence does need to be kept in mind in the future when CFD weighs in on maintenance categories. Bearcat (talk) 18:32, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

If the whole thing does get reverted, please ping me so I can update AnomieBOT again. But updating the tool should be a simple matter of changing the category title in the code. Anomie ⚔ 20:00, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you all for your patience. I'll add a note into WP:CFDAI to ask here before experimenting again with admin categories. – Fayenatic London 21:12, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Best page to explain the Vector skin

I am trying to find a page that explains to users what the Vector skin is. If you enter "Vector", you go Vector, which is a disamb page with a hatnote that says

For the default skin on the English Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Vector.

But Wikipedia:Vector is an inactive page that is retained for historical reference. Is the best page we have? I can remember seeing much better explanations than this, but I can't remember where they are. --Margin1522 (talk) 05:02, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Vector ? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:34, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, I did look at that, but it seems to be for administrators who want to install Vector on Wiki. As of now, the best page I've found is Wikipedia:Skins, so I think I am going to suggest that the hatnote point there. According to stats.grok.se, Wikipedia:Vector is averaging almost 100 hits a day, which is way too many for a historical page. I bet most of those hits are users who want to know more about Vector, or even what a skin is. Maybe I should take this to the Help project. --Margin1522 (talk) 11:40, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Or you could expand the mediawiki.org page and redirect people there.... merging the relevant parts of the en.wiki page might be a start. 213.204.37.227 (talk) 15:19, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

That's an idea, but maybe these should be kept separate. I wouldn't want to subject ordinary users to a description of MediaWiki tarballs ;) But yes, MediaWiki would be a good place for this. I did find [this article] on the net. That was interesting -- what it looks like to a web designer. It also had a link to the wiki of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative, which looks promising. --Margin1522 (talk) 17:49, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia Android app: editing

I've tried editing using the app, but it tells me my account is blocked. I have the unified SUL for this username (and have had for some time) but there's nothing in my global account details to suggest such an account exists, let alone is blocked. Can anyone explain how this could be the case and, more to the point, help get the block removed and the account unified to my SUL. Thanks. --Dweller (talk) 12:43, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@Dweller: Perhaps your mobile IP is hard-blocked? What exactly is the block message you are seeing? All accounts with the username Dweller belongs to you, afaics (Special:CentralAuth/Dweller) and none of them is blocked. --Glaisher (talk) 15:27, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Dweller's account on en.wp was created on 16 September 2005 so WP:SUL doesn't necessarily apply fully; SUL came in around May 2008. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:21, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Should be easy to check blocks, by switching between WiFi and 3G connections. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 19:37, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

OK, I fixed it, but the fix doesn't make sense. While the app was saying I was logged in, it seems I wasn't. Logging out and logging back in again permitted this edit [1] Thanks for trying to help! --Dweller (talk) 20:24, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Gender template / magic word

Does the {{Gender}} template still work? Is there still a {{GENDER}} magic word -- not seeing it listed at magic word. NE Ent 12:49, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

There is: {{GENDER:SiBr4|male|female}} → male. {{Infobox user}} uses this to return a "♂" or "♀" icon. The template for some reason doesn't return anything: {{Gender|SiBr4}} → he. SiBr₄ (talk) 13:37, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Fixed Anomie ⚔ 13:41, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! NE Ent 16:20, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

See mw:Help:Magic words#gender for documentation. Anomie ⚔ 13:41, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@NE Ent: It's been listed at Help:Magic words since this edit of 17:18, 11 April 2010. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:39, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

D'oh. Must have done case sensitive search ... Thanks. NE Ent 16:20, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

You mentioned the help page at Meta, which indeed does not list {{GENDER}} even though the ones at MediaWiki and here do. SiBr₄ (talk) 16:48, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Amazon kindle 3G cannot login

FYI. With the Amazon kindle subscription I can connect to Wikipedia with no additional charge. However I tried to login on the mobile website (which requires login) and I was only served a blank page. Works fine with wifi connection, so it is not a limitation in the browser. Do you think this is intentional, or is Amazon blocking some necessary resource inadvertently? 213.204.37.227 (talk) 15:13, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't know. We'll need to ask User:Maryana (WMF) to look into this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:33, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

"Contributors" link

I'm suddenly seeing a "Contributors" link on Androgenic alopecia, but it's only at the basic version of the page (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgenic_alopecia only, as opposed to &action=history, &action=edit, etc.) and there's no comparable link on other articles that I'm viewing, even ones through Special:Random that I've never before seen in my life. What could be causing it? Immediately below the "history" tab is the code [https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/articleinfo/?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&grouped=on&page=Androgenic_alopecia Contributors] and I can't figure out what's causing it; I don't see anything in the page's code that would produce such a link, and I'm not familiar with any of the article's templates that would have this effect. Maybe it's some new code feature that gets applied automatically, but those normally have tracking categories (e.g. the AF5 category for the Wikipedia:Article Feedback Tool), and this article's categories are either stuff such as Conditions of the skin appendages or routine hiddencats such as Articles with unsourced statements from April 2014 and Commons category with page title same as on Wikidata. Final note, I'm viewing the page in Monobook with IE10; if I view it in some version of Firefox while logged out, the link is absent. Nyttend (talk) 14:11, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Here's what's going on--and I'm trying to remain neutral on this;

The specific change is due to an included template, Template:Infobox disease adding this external link (on labs server).
There seem to be multiple related discussions going on at

VPPR
WT:MED

So that's it from a technical point of view. As to if this sort of change should be going on, please join the discussion at WP:VPPR so we don't fork it. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:37, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

It's also being discussed at Template talk:Infobox disease#Position of floating contributors link. WP:MULTI fails again. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:45, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Head desk.. what a terrible, terrible idea, from a technical perspective... If you want to change the UI, SUBMIT A PATCH TO THE SOFTWARE !!!, instead of making hacks on the content... —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 14:59, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

It's a bit of a kludge, but it's not unreasonable to do initial testing of an experimental feature this way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:34, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

It is unreasonable. I'm trying to cleanup quotation templates and then people add THIS shit? Really... This makes me want to throw my hands in the air and stop working on this kind of stuff, people clearly don't understand, don't want to understand so why should I even try anymore ? Let's just let everything go to crap and and add shit like this to Apple's dictionary app (guess no one thought to consider THAT did they ?) I'm truly seething with anger right now... —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 09:38, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Problems searching WP:ANI archives

For some reason, archive searches don't seem to be working for WP:ANI - I spent some time trying to find the thread where this post [2] was archived, and ended up having to search the archive by hand to find it - in Archive 843. [3] The problem can be clearly demonstrated by searching for the thread header ("Re-evaluating admin decision from September 2013") in the 'Noticeboard archives' search field on the ANI page - it doesn't find the thread. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:44, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

It works for me but I have "New search" enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. The page is not found when I disable it. The problem is the page size. I think only around the first 500 kb is searched with the old search. Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive843 is 683,864 bytes. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:19, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks - that seemed to do it. Hopefully the new search can be made the default soon. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:14, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Mmmm. I was under the impression that for "old" searches, it didn't look beyond the first 256K of each page - maybe they raised it to 512K. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:30, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't know the precise limit, or whether it's a precise limit at all, but in a test [4] I found Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive527#Vandalism by Sesshomaru near the end of a 406K page. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:00, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Draft pages polluting content categories

The new WP:DRAFTS namespace is yet another cause of pollution of content categories. As an example Category:Indonesia is full of draft pages. They should not be able to be saved into content categories at all. Automated means cannot be used to prevent them from being saved into content categories since they are not defined in software. Would it be possible to automatically strip category links (i.e. comment out or whatever) from saved Draft namespace pages? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 05:35, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Agreed that this is a problem. Maybe we can modify the category code to allow filtering namespaces allowed inside a category. Then when a draft page is moved to mainspace, the previously ignored category tags will automatically work and no modification is needed. I think this is a better alternative to stripping the links (which will require the mover to re-add them later). Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 06:05, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

A bot was approved to work on this. @GoingBatty: Is this bot task running? -- John of Reading (talk) 06:27, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Drafts should never get into content categories in the first place. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 08:27, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

They shouldn't, but they do. What seems to happen is that a relatively-inexperienced user wishes to create an article - say, a biog of their favourite sports star - so they go through article wizard to create a page in Draft: space. But instead of writing from scratch, they copypaste the biog of a different person (one who plays the same sport, possibly one who plays for the same country or team), and then change the names, dates, physical attributes, scores etc. as appropriate. In so doing they will often amend the "People born in ..." categories to match the known information, but don't realise that these cats are inappropriate for draft space. I worked this out after coming across a number of drafts (several per week) all bearing {{pp-move-indef}} (which shouldn't be on any unprotected page, which virtually all drafts are, and especially not on a page which is intended to be moved at a later date), and often {{good article}} as well (which can, by definition, never be on a draft). --Redrose64 (talk) 09:21, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@Alan Liefting and John of Reading: Yes, my bot has been commenting out article categories from drafts, and I just ran it for Category:Indonesia. The hard part is finding which article categories are polluted with draft pages. For user pages, I refer to the great weekly Wikipedia:Database reports/Polluted categories report, and then use the same report for draft pages. I just submitted a request for a similar report specific for draft pages. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 14:19, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Why not just run alphabetically through all pages in draft space? bd2412 T 14:26, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@BD2412: How would you suggest creating a list of all pages in draft space? GoingBatty (talk) 21:18, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I would start by looking here, at the special pages list of "All pages with prefix (Draft namespace)". bd2412 T 21:21, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict)@BD2412: Finding the pages in draft space is easy, the hard part is identifying content categories as such, or more generally, determining if a given category is appropriate for draft space or not.

@GoingBatty: Instead of commenting out the category links or applying the colon trick, would it make sense to wrap content categories in {{main other}}? That way the categorization would be activated automagically once the page is moved to main space. — HHHIPPO 21:26, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@Hhhippo: That's a creative option not listed at Wikipedia:Drafts#Preparing drafts. Would it be appropriate to ask at Wikipedia talk:Drafts? GoingBatty (talk) 22:07, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: Sure, asking shouldn't hurt. But I have a feeling that including content categories via templates is not uncontroversial.— HHHIPPO 21:26, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Alan Liefting, draft pages should be in content categories for wikiproject people to pick them up in the first place. Contact of people with deep knowledge of a topic with the relevant newcomers is important.

That this software or people did not install this extension or some code with similar functionality seems odd. You'd be able to view fresh category members limited to a namespace at ease. --Gryllida (talk) 23:17, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@Alan Liefting: I can see some benefit to that, but it goes against the current guidance at Wikipedia:Drafts#Preparing drafts. You might want to propose this at Wikipedia talk:Drafts. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 23:50, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Added. --Gryllida (talk) 02:36, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I wish that categories would be made transcludable, Luaable, eligible for user fine-tuning. For example, make it so that the categories in the category are accessible from Category:X as template parameters, and allow us to suppress the default output if we desire. That way we can fine-tune one category to exclude Draft: and Wikipedia: pages, another to allow them, a third to allow only one or the other, and a fourth, with 10,000 members, to organize them in a logical set of subcategories according to the peculiarities of that particular topic. In other words, make Wikipedia more flexible and editor configurable, the exact opposite of the direction Flow is going. Wnt (talk) 14:43, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I agree with Alan that they should not be categorized--about half of them should not be that generally seen until they are much improved, or not generally seen at all. There are other options for sorting, such as the WP:Deletion sorting mechanism. And at any rate, we do not need the detailed sorting of the category system for drafts. DGG ( talk ) 18:41, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I fail to see how deletion sorting would help to fix this issue. The drafts concerned are not up for deletion (some of them may be, but the majority are not), and pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Organizations are essentially a series of transclusions of AfD nominations. What would you wish to be done when there is no AfD nom - transclude the draft itself? --Redrose64 (talk) 22:02, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Possible error in MfD instructions

It would be very helpful if editors who are proficient in working with templates could take a look at Wikipedia talk:Miscellany for deletion#Error in the instructions?. Thanks! --Tryptofish (talk) 23:48, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decisions (original)

The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.

If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.

-- JurgenNL (talk) 17:35, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

In the interest of NPOV, where can we sign a petition supporting the Foundation if we have an opposite point of view from German chapter? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:14, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

@Piotrus: You'll have to start another page for that. The page he links to is just an open letter he is asking for signatures on. Zell Faze (talk) 00:08, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Move revision history problems

I clerk at WP:SPI. I tried to do something out of the ordinary, and it failed. Worse, I'm not sure I can put things back the way they were. At least I don't see how. For the background, please look at this discussion. Hopefully, what I did, what Berean did after, and what I want to achieve is clear. I don't think it was clear to Berean.

Ideally, I'd like to achieve what I wanted in the first place, but if that's not possible, I'd at least like to put both pages back to exactly the way they were before I started moving things and editing them.

This is rather important. If anyone has a solution, please explain what it is. It's getting toward dinner time at my house, so I'm going to have to take a break, but I'll check in later this evening before going to bed.

Many thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:49, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

What I see here is that you did as follows:L

You moved all the revisions of page 1 to page 2; in doing so, you deleted what had been at page 2.
You restored the deleted revisions at page 2. (The njext step made this completely irrelevant) Now there is no way, from the software prospective, to tell apart the 2 groups of revisions.
You deleted page 2.
You restored some of the page 2 revisions. The rest are still at page 2; if I understand correctly, you want these at page 1.

If I'm correct, the revisions you want are at page 2. Move page 2 to a temporary location; restore page 2 and move back to page 1; and move the temporary page back to page 2. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 10:59, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Grants to improve your project

Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants program is accepting proposals for funding new experiments from September 1st to 30th. Your idea could improve Wikimedia projects with a new tool or gadget, a better process to support community-building on your wiki, research on an important issue, or something else we haven't thought of yet. Whether you need $200 or $30,000 USD, Individual Engagement Grants can cover your own project development time in addition to hiring others to help you.

Submit your proposal
Get help: In IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session PEarley (WMF) (talk) 15:18, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

VE blocks Hangul.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72353

When I tried to type in Hangul (한굴) using the Visual Editor, I couldn't. I could erase existing Hangul letters but not put in the correct ones. As soon as I typed them, the text jumped and the letters disappeared. Using the source editor, there was no problem. (This was on the Vladivostok page.) Kdammers (talk) 13:43, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@Kdammers: can you please share what browser and what version of that browser you were using for that action, so that people can try to reproduce it ? —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 14:53, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I believe that Korean is not supported at this time. Anything requiring IME support should be assumed impossible right now. There is some major work going on for language support. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:31, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Hold on a second, VE doesn't support plain text entry from the OS? Is there any reason to believe that VE isn't an engineering disaster from the ground up and will never be suitable for doing anything but mangling articles? Van Isaac_WS^cont 05:11, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Isn't IME how mobile devices with touch-screens work? I thought mobile was the future? Deltahedron (talk) 16:29, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

@Vanisaac: Until we know at least what OS and what browser this happened on, there are no reasons not to believe anything. Right now it's impossible to tell what, if anything, is broken. Stop hatemongering.

@Deltahedron: VE is already available on mobile devices and seems to work okay last time I checked. You need to enable "Beta" on Special:MobileOptions, then re-visit the page and enable "Experimental mode" too, to see it. Matma Rex talk 17:30, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

@Matma Rex: It's not hatemongering, it's a serious question, borne of the experience of spending two months cleaning up the messes left behind after VE's catastrophic en.wiki rollout last year. I primarily do project-style work in the area of writing systems, so the ability to insert plain Unicode text into articles is at the heart of the content I care about on Wikipedia. If VE will never accept plain Unicode text, then that means we are going to be sitting around, waiting for WMF developers - who have earned themselves an incredibly negative reputation in this community - to get around to supporting minority scripts, if they are ever given leeway and resources to even get around to it. If they haven't figured out how to support Korean Hangul, a script that has literally been in Unicode from the beginning in 1991, then how many decades are we away from support for important minority and historical scripts, like Modi, which Unicode and the Script Encoding Initiative have been working diligently over the last decade to get encoded? Van Isaac_WS^cont 22:09, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Vanisaac, I happen know a bit about Kdammers' computer setup (TheDJ, it's Mozilla on Windows 7) from our previous discussions. He's not using "plain text entry from the OS" when he's typing Korean. If he had a Korean keyboard, and thus was actually doing "plain text entry" rather than complex IME-based character entry, it might work now. As it currently stands, the language engineering team is working on Korean, Chinese, and a few other languages with complex requirements. If you're interested in this area and adept with using these systems, then I'm sure that David would be happy to have you testing things in a few months. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:18, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I did some testing:

Ibus-hangul (Korean input method) seems to work correctly in Firefox 32.0. In Chromium 37.0.2062.94, I see spaces instead of letters. However, if a syllable only consists of two letters, the syllable shows up after typing in the second letter. It seems that syllables consisting of more than two letters can't be typed in using Chromium.
Anthy (Japanese input method) is broken in both browsers.

I have not tested how unfree software works. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:43, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Stefan2. If you're interested in helping test language support in the future, please leave a note on my talk page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:18, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I am using the most recent version of Mozilla on a PC. This is with Windows OS (the last one before they one that copied iPhones - I guess it's windows 7). Kdammers (talk) 03:25, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

My keyboard is an hp dual-script one, i.e., it has key which switches input to from Latin to Hangul letters. This is the standard keyboard in the ROK.Kdammers (talk) 03:34, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Kdammers, I had a look through the open bug reports on VisualEditor, and the only one that mentions Korean language entry is T52631. This sounds to me like a different problem—the original reporter gets parts of the characters to show up—but I'd appreciate it if you would look it over and tell me if anything in it sounds familiar. Your report is now T72353. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

It seems a little different: The bug at 70353 only eats part of words, where-as when I typed Hangul, all that I wrote was eaten. I was typing in a paragraph that was in English with some foreign script included, and I was trying to amend the last part of a word.Kdammers (talk) 01:42, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

New wikEdDiff / wDiff

After a long time, I have finally found the time to improve/rewrite wikEdDiff (.js) and its underlying wDiff (.js) library. It now has the following major features and improvements:

Improved design and integration (colors, popup titles)
Block move detection and visualization
Resolution down to characters level
Optimization of the length of moved blocks
Stepwise split (paragraphs, sentences, words, chars)
Recursive diff
Bubbling up of ambiguous unresolved regions to next line break

You can test it by using wikEdDiff (can be checked under gadgets in your preferences). It is also part of wikEd. I have tested it extensively and would like to hear your suggestions and ideas. Cacycle (talk) 22:15, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Interesting re-cat hiccup

I am experiencing some strange categorisation effects. No harm though. Of mw interest?

Today, I moved module:RailGauge to module:Track gauge (with its associations; the template {{Track gauge}} was moved weeks before so today I only changed its #invoke link). Also, by separate & intentional code change the articles transcluding this are re-categorised 1:1 from old Category:Articles that mention a specific rail gauge to new Category:Articles that mention a specific track gauge for maintenance. (so 'rail' is old, 'track' is new). The parent cat was/is: Category:Articles that mention a specific rail gauge (234 C) Category:Articles that mention a specific track gauge (190 C, now). Fine so far, except for the 190-234 number.

At this moment, some new categories do not show up correctly (out of 234 old categories, only 190 are in the new parent category). Also, the missing categories do not appear hidden in the article. For example: Rail transport in Sweden shows Category:Articles that mention track gauge 891 mm not hidden as expected (while this 1524 mm is), and that cat is also missing in parent. By subcat counting, 234 - 190 = 44 categories are questioned.

Importance? Low to me. It could be a time effect - tomorrow it might be gone. OK with me, I do patience (although the current situation does have a hidden cat in content/readers view). Maybe mw-people like to know about this. I can give more background, of course. -DePiep (talk) 20:24, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Try purging the pages that are having the issue (the "*" button at the top, if you have that enabled, or adding ?action=purge to the end of the URL) and see if that fixes it. It might not, but it's a good first shot. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 20:57, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

I had done, on multiple pages, no effect. Do you see things OK in Rail transport in Sweden? (check the 891 mm vs. 1524 mm categories; they should be hidden both). The new parent category Category:Articles that mention a specific track gauge counts 195, right now. So it must be a time=patience thing. -DePiep (talk) 21:14, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Most things will resolve on their own if you wait long enough. However, I did go through and automatically purge everything still linked to Module:RailGuage which seems to have depopulated the old rail categories. Hidden categories should resolve on their own eventually, but if you want to force them to update you may have to purge both the category page and the affected article page (in that order). Incidentally, one possible reason for a count difference is that new categories may never be created if the old category was already depopulated before the change. Are you sure all 234 categories had articles in them? Dragons flight (talk) 21:23, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

233 out of 234 cats had articles (mainsp). The new categories we created manually by me before (AWB), before module/template (code change) populated them.

As I said, I trust time so I don't worry, but maybe mw-people might be interested. After all, a hidden cat was shown to the reader, temporally. (My earlier example Sweden, is OK now). -DePiep (talk) 21:39, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Something is wrong with Wikimedia Commons and the images

I can't upload new images ("internal server error" / "There was an error while uploading the file to stash." ; that's how I discovered the problem initially), and all of the images on Wikipedia fail to render. I was able to upload images fine just a few minutes ago, though. Dustin (talk) 20:44, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Indeed; Commons images don't show on WP for me, USA. — TORTOISE WRATH 20:47, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

I noticed this when purging a page with many Commons images on it. They don't display. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 20:48, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Yup, I see it now too.--v/r - T P 20:49, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Seems to be working now for me.--v/r - T P 20:50, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Some are, some aren't. Images on some pages (Ronald Reagan, for instance) are displaying, even after purging. Others (Jeff Gordon) are...decidedly not. Including Wikipedia 'maintiance' images, like the 'lock' image on protected pages. Example image provided as Exhibit "A". - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 20:52, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

It appears that purging the pages that are borked is fixing them. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 20:53, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

I think they've fixed the problem; I was able to upload that image to Commons. Now, the pages just have to be purged. Dustin (talk) 20:55, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Something is wrong with the files

Already under discussion above. Try purging the page and see if it fixes it. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 20:54, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Something is very wrong with files from Commons.--85.74.90.24 (talk) 20:46, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

See the above section. Dustin (talk) 20:48, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Commons images suddenly not appearing

Already under discussion above. Try purging the page and see if it fixes it. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 20:55, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Talk:Old School Privy claims that it has links to two nonexistent images, File:Flag of Ohio.svg and File:Mountrushmore.jpg. Both of these images have been deleted here, but they're on Commons without any problems that I can see. What's going on? Nyttend (talk) 20:49, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Again, I believe that you should see the above section. Dustin (talk) 20:50, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Problem with gadget that adds edit links to lead sections

The gadget that adds edit links to lead sections also provides an "edit beta" link if VE is enabled. However, the link is incorrect; it should not have the "&vesection=1" parameter -- VE doesn't do section editing at the moment, and the only result is that an incorrect edit summary is defaulted to on saving. How can the gadget be changed to get rid of this parameter on that link? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:46, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I wish I could identify the page in question, but I'm not that technically capable. Go to MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition to see the gadget code; this one is added via the code edittop[ResourceLoader|dependencies=user.options]|edittop.js|edittop.css, but I can't identify from where it's drawing the scripts themselves. Nyttend (talk) 04:32, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

It's MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js and there is an outstanding related problem at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-edittop.js#Bug report: duplicate article titles.

@Nyttend: You correctly identified the entry in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition, and here's how to determine the files used. Remove anything inside square brackets (giving edittop|edittop.js|edittop.css); then split what remains at each pipe, and prefix each item with MediaWiki:Gadget- - this gives the filenames, i.e. MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.css. Of these, the first (without an extension) is the description shown at Preferences → Gadgets, the remainder (of which there may be one or more in total) are the actual scripts (those with extension .js) and style sheets (those with extension .css) comprising the gadget proper. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:24, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose64:: thanks -- I also didn't know how to find the gadget code. I had a look through the .js (it's been many years since I last used Javascript) and I was surprised to see that there was no mention of VE. Can you tell me from that code how the "&vesection=1" parameter gets added to the link, and how the [edit beta] link is added? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:34, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Although I've made three edits to that JavaScript file (one of which was reverted directly, the other two have been nullified by subsequent edits), I don't actually know how it works (disclaimer: I don't use VE, and I amended edittop at a time when VE was forced upon everybody and the only available opt-out was "dirty": even if disabled at prefs, VE was still being loaded, even for normal edits, and its presence broke a number of gadgets, edittop included). I worked on the basis that it takes the existing edit link for the first true section, creates an extra link as a copy of the existing edit link (but positioned level with the page title), and alters the URL in the new link so that any instance of section=1 in the query string is altered to section=0. It therefore shouldn't matter what else is in the query string, it should remain unchanged. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:07, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

That explains what's happening, though I suspect it checks for &section=1, not section=1, because the top [edit beta] link actually says &veaction=edit&vesection=1, not &veaction=edit&vesection=0. It sounds like the right fix would be to add another substitution: any instance of &vesection=1 in the link being duplicated should be deleted. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:27, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

This has now been fixed by TheDJ. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:17, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

@Nyttend: see bugzilla:60142. Helder 02:13, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Indefinite protection no longer available

If there is a page with no edit protection, but indefinite move protection, and I want to increase the level of edit protection whilst leaving move protection alone, I typically go into the "change protection" screen, set the desired new level of edit prot, and its duration, select (or fill in) a reason, and click Confirm. But in at least three recent instances, doing this has thrown the error "Expiry time is invalid." Investigation shows that the expiry time that is "invalid" is that of the move protection, which I didn't change. The "Expires" selection list shows "other time", and the appropriate entry in the prot log shows "‎[move=sysop] (indefinite)". If I then open the "Expires" selection list, I find that "indefinite" is no longer listed as an option, but has been replaced by "infinite". When I select that, the Confirm button works as it should. The peculiar thing is that having done that, the newly-created prot log entry has "[move=sysop] (indefinite)", just like the old one; and that if I go into the "change protection" screen again, immediately after protecting the page successfully, the "Expires" selection list is not positioned at "infinite", but is back at "other time" - the value that had thrown an error previously. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:06, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

"Indefinite" vs. "infinite" has been that way for few years; I think it's controlled by MediaWiki:Protect-expiry-options. The main issue is one I've been experiencing recently as well. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:30, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I've noticed this too. The "expiry time is invalid" error happens when you leave "other time" selected as one of the protection lengths. It's easy to do this when the page has different levels of move and edit protection, and you change the edit protection but not the move protection. This is a new thing which I think (because of the timing) was caused by the superprotect rollout. Previously the protection level input boxes had defaults that didn't cause the error. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:58, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I have a fix for the blank "other" bug sitting in gerrit waiting for review. Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:12, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Strange behaviour for deleted paged

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52829

Special:Notifications looks strange when a page has been deleted. This picture shows that I was notified about activity related to c:File:Saif-ul-Malook Lake Pakistan.jpg, but the file name is missing on the Special:Notifications page. Also, the use of [No page] looks strange and breaks the wikicode used to generate that message. This seems to be a bug. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:12, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, the developers are aware of this one. -- John of Reading (talk) 04:35, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Phoenician font

In the article Phoenician alphabet the unicode characters in the tables are not being rendered. I have downloaded the Phoenician font from Omniglot and succesfully installed it (I can use it in Word), but the Wikipedia article is still not rendering it. Any help appreciated (Monobooks, Firefox 31, Windows 7 SP1). SpinningSpark 12:16, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Like in his section? It does not go through all your fonts on the system. It appears to go through 'ALPHABETUM Unicode', 'MPH 2B Damase', Aegean, Code2001, 'Free Sans', and the default browser font. --Gryllida (talk) 12:26, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I found that page while you were replying. The first two, ALPHABETUM and MPH 2B Damase are not free. I have installed the fonts here which I arrived at by following the link to "Free Sans" on the template documentation page. Still not seeing the fonts rendered. Should the Omniglot font be added to the template? It seems to be the first port of call for users wanting non-Latin scripts. SpinningSpark 13:02, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Free Sans seems to work just fine (you have to restart your browser). ~~In fact, Arial also works just fine.~~ The template reverts to 'serif', which does not work, so I added a fallback to 'sans-serif'. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 13:21, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Strike that; Chrome used Free Sans secretly anyway. These template depending on local fonts are not reliable at all. Work on Unicode support continues, and Google's Noto fonts have been named as a possible solution which should remove dependencies on locally installed fonts. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 13:28, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Also, the Omniglot font won't work, as the characters are not mapped to the proper Unicode points. (Instead, they're mapped to standard alphabet.) -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 13:34, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Playing with the template in Sandbox, it seems that the problem with the Free Sans font is that the filename is actually "FreeSans", not "Free Sans". The table works if I preview it with the templates pointing to my sandbox instead. I am a bit reluctant to edit the template because of the possibility of breaking multiple articles. Is the safest thing to add "FreeSans" rather than change "Free Sans". Shame about the Omniglot file, it has better glyphs in my opinion. The glyphs in Free Sans are rather strange and not a bit like the images in the article. SpinningSpark 13:55, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

If the font from omniglot is reasonable for this script, I'd not hesitate to add it to the template. --Gryllida (talk) 14:22, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I have added the FreeSans font and am at least now getting something other than the raw codepoints now. The problem with Omniglot, as Edokter says, is that it is mapped to the wrong codepoints. It appears to be mapped to the standard Latin codepoints, presumably for ease of use with a keyboard. By the way, how are you viewing the character map? The Unicode codepoints start at 10900 (hex) for this script, but I am not seeing any characters in FreeSans above FFFF in either the Windows character map or the Nexus Font character map. SpinningSpark 14:49, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Set the "Group by" option to "Unicode subrange", then you can select the various scripts and groups. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 23:22, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

@Edokter: Thanks, but I still can't see anything above FFFF in character map and Phoenician does not appear in the list of groups. Also, the "go to unicode" box will not accept five-digit codes. SpinningSpark 17:04, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

My bad. Charmap does not seem to support Unicode 5.0 (or at least > FFFF). I do know FreeSans works in Chrome (using WhatFont extention). -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 23:01, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Displaying Wikidata IDs

Articles (and other pages) have a link in the left-hand navigation that reads "Wikidata item". Can we change this (or have a gadget or user script to change it) to something like "Wikidata: Q12345", or better "Wikidata: Q12345" (or even, if it's a script, just "Q12345")? Life would be improved a little, if the ID were easier to copy. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:32, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

There is a userscript for this you can import from Wikidata, at d:User:Yair rand/WikidataInfo.js. Add the following your common or skin-specific js:

mw.loader.load("//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Yair rand/WikidataInfo.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"); // Backlink: [[d:User:Yair rand/WikidataInfo.js]]

to add a link to Wikidata under the article title, along with the ID number, description, aliases. Or someone with the technical skills could probably adapt it to replace the link in the left-hand nav. - Evad37 [talk] 03:42, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

@Evad37: That's just the job, and works well. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:56, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

@Evad37: - I love this! It's great. Can it work with Creator templates in Commons? That would be very helpful. - PKM (talk) 23:39, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Edit summary interface stuff

Few things:

For the MediaWiki:Summary interface page, I propose we change the text from "the changes you have made" to "your changes". Please add to discussion on talk page.

What is this MediaWiki:Tooltip-ep-summary interface page? I don't see this text being used as a tooltip anywhere. The page also needs explanation and categorization.

The MediaWiki:Tooltip-summary interface page also needs explanation and categorization. I do see this as the tooltop for the edit summary inputbox. Is also being used as the tooltip for the Subject/headline input box for new sections?

Jason Quinn (talk) 03:49, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

@Jason Quinn: Hey,

For <Summary>, we should consider what's wrong with the default message ("Summary:") and consider resetting to that, or upstream the improvements we think are worthwhile for all languages, not just English. Note for example that people with "British English" as their interface language, like me, don't see the current value you think it's set to – instead we see [5] the default. We can play whack-a-mole and try to fix all of them, but…
The <tooltip-ep-summary> message is a used by the Education Programme – not sure who's lead on that right now. Unfortunately the guidance about what it's used for isn't very helpful, and it appears like it's not used…
I think the documentation for <tooltip-summary> is reasonably clear, but if you think it should be altered please fix it. :-)

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

The changes were made due to this discussion back in 2006. I guess the default message "Summary" isn't clear enough. Summary of what? The part that you edited? The whole article? The changes? (It's obvious to me it's the changes, but it needs to be obvious to everybody.) To eliminate the ambiguity, they added the parenthetical remark. It's also the best place to link the help for the edit summary so that was done too. I think it's definitely an improvement over just "Summary:". What are you proposing be done? Have this message added to Mediawiki itself? What about the hyperlink? I don't know what fraction of the language projects have an equivalent to that. Jason Quinn (talk) 23:30, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

@Jason Quinn: Thanks for responding. Yes, I'm suggesting that if you have improvements you think are valuable you should consider whether it's worth making them for all users, not just English Wikipedia users. This message has been over-ridden on a bunch of wikis, so you're probably right that "Summary:" isn't good enough and we should improve that. Adding a link that might not exist isn't a big problem (we can set it up so wikis can have it not be a link if they don't have a page). Fixing it that way is the right way to do it and works better. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:49, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Local time template

Is there such thing as a "local time" template? Here is what I am thinking: article such as Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 are referring to events in UTC. I'm wondering if a template like {{local time|UTC time here}} would produce something like "17:10 UTC (12:10 PST)" in an article. The local time would use the user's time zone setting to produce a time for them. This would be useful both for a frame of reference for knowing the events at the time where the event is located, and knowing the time of events at the time for the person reading the article. For IP users, it could attempt to geolocate their location and timezone similar to the geo-watchlists and if it cannot determine a location it would just leave the extra bit inside the parenthesis & the parenthesis themselves out. Does this exist, is it possible, it is useful?--v/r - T P 20:45, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Gary's Comments in Local Time is a custom Javascript that does that for signature timestamps. A more general local time gadget could be based on that. Using the time zone from a user's preferences in a template would require a magic word or Lua command that returns it; if that does not exist a time converter with specified time zone (e.g. {{local time|UTC time|UTC offset}}) could still be useful for other purposes. SiBr₄ (talk) 21:30, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

If such a thing were to be created, it should just output HTML5 <time> tags and then JS would insert the correct local time info. The easiest thing for it to do would be to just use the timezone from the reader's browser; logged-in users' timezone could be fetched from the API (like this, see "timecorrection") if that seems useful, but for IP users the browser is more likely to be correct than geolocating. I doubt there will ever be a magic word or Lua method to fetch the user's preferences due to the cache issues that would cause. Anomie ⚔ 13:20, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

tool for checking a list of articles

Hi all, Is there a tool for checking if a long list of potential article titles (in, say, csv format) exist as articles? (I have a list of organisms, and I want to see if they have Wikipedia articles or not). Thanks! -- phoebe / (talk to me) 23:55, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

How about this: Convert it into a list of wikilinks (no help from Wikipedia for that, although it wouldn't be too hard to write a progrm to do this in any major programming language). Then create a subpage in your userspace with the wikilinks (or even just preview it, if you want a one-time answer). עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:53, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

A regex find/replace like (\n)(.*?)\n → $1* [[$2]]$1 converts each line to a wikilink. It works in the find&replace tool in the advanced edit toolbar (simpler regexes using ^/$ apparently don't).

Another on-wiki method would be to convert the list to

{{#ifexist:Article 1|* [[Article 1]]
}}{{#ifexist:Article 2|* [[Article 2]]
}}{{#ifexist:Article 3|* [[Article 3]]
...
}}

which returns a list of the existing articles only (or, by doubling each pipe, non-existing ones only). This however doesn't work for more than 500 titles at a time, since {{#ifexist}} is an expensive parser function. SiBr₄ (talk) 10:38, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

My idea works regardless of the number of articles, simply check for red links (or blue links, depending on what you want); or have AWB find them for you with its list-making feature. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:20, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks all. I made a subpage list of red/blue links. Kind of surprised there's not a tool out there to do this. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 23:55, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Contributors link on some Medicine articles

I've made an edit request at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-ContributorsHack.js that the contributors link at the top of some WikiProject Medicine articles be made opt-in and so it doesn't display for IPs. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 03:11, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

This is in relation to #"Contributors" link above, and the various threads linked from that. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:48, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Emails not arriving

Dr.K. has twice sent me emails in the last several minutes, but I've not received either of them. I've checked the email address that I use for Wikipedia purposes, and neither one has shown up in the inbox or in the spam folder. This address is set up so that all spam, even the worst of the Natural Male Enhancement stuff, gets thrown into a special folder rather than being deleted automatically; as a result, I'm quite confident that Dr.K's emails have never reached my server. I know it's the correct email address; another Wikipedia email arrived through it little more than an hour ago. Any ideas what could be responsible? Nyttend (talk) 05:29, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

This is very disturbing. I have sent copies to myself so I have both of these emails. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 05:32, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Never mind, as they just arrived together. It is weird, though: the first email took an hour to arrive. Perhaps some server hiccup? Nyttend (talk) 05:38, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

It could be. Even servers suffer from ailments sometimes. :) Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 05:41, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I have had some problems with mail not arriving in recent weeks as well. It might be worth filing a bug. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 23:48, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

@Nyttend: just out of interest, are you using a webmail provider, or a "proper" domain for emails? --Mdann52talk to me! 12:56, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm checking the webmail service of Road Runner High Speed Online. Nyttend (talk) 13:00, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

More eyes needed at Template talk:Authority control

Template talk:Authority control seems to be under-watched, and has several sections needing a response. Template editors/ Lua coders are especially needed, and there's a policy-related discusison about a Russian fork of the template, which might be useful here. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:49, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Is there a tool to count redirects?

I contribute to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and at this redirect tool page I see over 100 redirects due to the many names the group has gone by, which may be WP all-time record. Is there a tool that counts article redirects? If there isn't there should be, it could help fight redirect spam.~Technophant (talk) 16:23, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

A plain list of redirects can be loaded on-wiki using WhatLinksHere; copying into Excel shows that ISIL has 98 redirects. Dispenser's tool also shows that number at the bottom of the page. Or are you asking for a tool that generates a list of articles by the number of redirects to it? SiBr₄ (talk) 16:58, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

"Page information" in the "Tools" menu also shows the number of redirects. Wikipedia:Pages with most redirects is not updated but says the 2010 record was 923 redirects to Gospel of Matthew. There are currently 853. Most of them are numbered passages like Matthew 27:25. There is no entry for redirects at Wikipedia:Wikipedia records#Links. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:25, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Background color of navigation bar

For years, I have had the following code in my user CSS to change my background color (obviously, replacing "somecolor" with an actual CSS color) in the Vector skin:

#mw-page-base, #mw-head-base, #content, #firstHeading, #bodyContent { background-color: somecolor; }

Today, some change (presumably some update in MediaWiki or the Vector skin) broke this so that my CSS no longer changes the background color of the navigation bar on the left side of the screen (it now stays in gray despite my attempts to change the background color). I tried adding:

#mw-navigation { background-color: somecolor; }

to change the navigation bar background color, but this does nothing by itself. I next tried:

#mw-navigation, #mw-head, #mw-panel { background-color: somecolor; }

which now changes the background color of part of the navigation bar, but leaves a bunch of gaps where the gray continues showing. How do I override all the gray of the navigation bar? Thanks. —SeekingAnswers (reply) 03:56, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

The background color for the nevaigation bar is now defined on the <body> element. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:25, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! :) In case anyone is wondering, I found that to change the background color of the navigation bar, in addition to setting the background color of the BODY element, #mw-head must also be set, or there will be a gap at the top. —SeekingAnswers (reply) 09:33, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikilove broken?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72448

Hey, all, is Wikilove broken for anyone else? Two people have said that they haven't been able to send them, and I haven't been able to send any, even after various combinations of sender and receiver accounts, and after disabling all my scripts. The HTTP response that one gets when trying to submit contains the following: {"servedby":"mw1141","error":{"code":"mustposttoken","info":"The 'token' parameter must be POSTed"}. Which is weird, because it looks like there is a token parameter in the POST data. I also not that, judging by filter 423, there haven't been any Wikiloves from anyone in nearly 24 hours. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 16:40, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

@Writ Keeper: Thanks for noticing, it's being looked into right now. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 17:58, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Away

Just a note, that for now, I have decided to no longer attend this wiki and that means especially this page. There has been flowing so much nastiness out of this community as of late by various editors, especially lately into the direction of the WMF and the developer community, that I just don't feel at home here the way I used to. I get it, I and people like me are no longer welcome here... So, adieu. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 23:46, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Userrights-groups-help in different versions of English

Given that MediaWiki:Userrights-groups-help has two English language variations MediaWiki:Userrights-groups-help/en-gb and MediaWiki:Userrights-groups-help/en-ca which are generally not updated when changes are made to the main page. The English in the three pages is exactly the same so there isn't a need for them for that reason. If we delete /en-gb or /en-ca will MediaWiki:Userrights-groups-help still show for people using British or Canadian English? If it won't would transcluding MediaWiki:Userrights-groups-help onto the two subpages work? I'm happy to do the legwork I just want to check what the best course of action is. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 08:05, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Deleting a MediaWiki interface page restores the page to the system default; see Special:AllMessages. Not all MediaWiki pages transclude properly, so you have to do some testing. British English is the fifth selected language, behind Spanish, French and Indonesian; see Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences. -- Gadget850^talk 11:28, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Please just delete them; en-gb interface messages are a very silly thing and much more trouble than they're worth. Andrew Gray (talk) 11:58, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

This is why I always choose the default interface language on all projects. People simply do not update interface messages in other languages. I took a look at this message in French and Spanish and found that those versions of the interface message contain a lot less information than the English one. --Stefan2 (talk) 13:52, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Pageview tool down again

The http://stats.grok.se tool has not run pageview totals for the last three days. I have notified Henrik at User_talk:Henrik#Pageviews_not_updating.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 17:05, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Watchlist drop-offs

For no apparent reason, I'm noticing random articles from my watchlist suddenly not showing up with recent edits. Naturally, I check that the article is watched and dates. Is anyone else seeing this happen over the last week or so? The most recent drop-off is Joan Rivers, for instance. Since I'm involved in a talk page dispute there, it's important to know when things change. Any ideas would be helpful.--Light show (talk) 19:36, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Figured it out. My watchlist preferences were set wrong. --Light show (talk) 22:12, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Notifications

(Not sure where to post this so apologies if this is the incorrect place)

Each and everytime I receive a new alert - I'm now greeted with a message option first - I'm not sure whether it's a bug as until yesterday I never had a "Message" or "Alert" option .. Just simply Notifications, Thanks, –Davey2010 • (talk) 20:59, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not positive, but I think it's related to Flow.- Mr X 21:12, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I see two similar notifications, and also a red "No formatting defined for notification." Works fine on Commons, though. Also works fine if I go to Special:Notifications instead of clicking on the number. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:21, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I have alerted the echo/flow team of this section. I'm sure they can help out if something indeed is amiss. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 21:32, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

That split of "Messages/Alerts" is only visible to editors who have helped test out Flow. Everyone else is just getting the Alerts section.

@Davey2010: Regarding the wrong section opening at first, I just filed that as bugzilla:70461.

@Stefan2: They're still investigating the "No formatting ..." error, but that's at bugzilla:67945.

Sorry for the bugs and confusions, all. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:33, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks TheDJ and Quiddity (WMF) for your help, Very much appreciated, Regards, –Davey2010 • (talk) 21:58, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF): I only get the "Alerts" one... but the font size is only 8px (MonoBook) - it's way too small, and since it's under 11px, it fails MOS:ACCESS#Text. I would never have noticed it had I not spotted this thread. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:10, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

That one is bugzilla:69873. Thanks for the nudge. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 02:37, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm having the same thing occur as listed on the right in the image posted above. I've notified Wikipedia:Flow at their talk page here. NorthAmerica¹⁰⁰⁰ 04:55, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Help needed at Wikispecies

I've created a version of {{Authority control}} and its subtemplates on Wikispecies: wikispecies:Template:Authority control, but there's an error in the ISNI subtemplate which I can't resolve. Could someone take a look there, please?

Also, the display is odd, as Wikispecies' CSS doesn't yet have our hlist class. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:14, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

The edit window for wikispecies:Template:Authority control/ISNI shows the used templates at the bottom where "Template:IsNum" is currently a red link. Note that wikispecies:Template:Authority control shows a second red link "Template:Dir" which is unrelated to the ISNI problem. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:26, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Good catches; now fixed; thank you. Now we just need the CSS tweak... Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:39, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Shaded background tooltips on hover

I'm using Chrome and the default skin. I am suddenly seeing something that I can only describe as pop-up tooltips with a shaded background whenever the mouse pointer is hovering over various links on my watchlist. It seems to apply to every single link in the main list, adds nothing and is distracting. I presume that this is some sort of CSS change of the totally pointless Facebook-isation variety. Can it be reverted/disabled? - Sitush (talk) 16:13, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

@Sitush: Are you talking about either Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups or mw:Extension:Popups? If not, can you post a screenshot of them? Jackmcbarn (talk) 16:36, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

No, popups like the tooltips used in office programs etc when you hover over menu icons. But these are appearing on good ole fashioned links. I'll try to take a screenshot when I've got a moment but am embroiled in something else right now. Where should I upload it? - Sitush (talk) 16:51, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

This is not our fault; Chrome has changed the default styling for tooltips to have a shadow. Chrome is known (notorious?) for changing the styles of it user interface on a regular basis. They once removed the arrows from the scrollbars... the horror! -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 16:54, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I'll try it in Firefox, which I prefer anyway but haven't installed yet on this device. - Sitush (talk) 17:17, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Firefox shadows the link mouseover tooltips too. Regarding screenshots, WP:WPSHOT. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:51, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

We also have Preferences → Beta features → Hovercards. -- Gadget850^talk 13:41, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Requesting help to identify and improve template at mr-wikipedia

Hi, few years ago Marathi Wikipedians created a template called mr:Template:अविशिष्ट उपपान (probably based on Template:Random subpage of en-wp) . As such mr:Template:अविशिष्ट उपपान is in use at multiple support subjects at mr-wp and is not updated since long. (Since it is used for high visitor traffic the template is secured for local sysops only) Its current parameters are as follows:

<includeonly>{{{{{1|{{{page|}}}}}}/{{#expr: {{rand | {{{3|{{{end|2}}}}}} - {{{2|{{{start|1}}}}}} + 1 | {{mod|{{#time:xnU}} | {{{4|{{{seed|2}}}}}}}} }} + {{{1|{{{start|1}}}}}} }}}}</includeonly><noinclude>

Lately mr:Template:अविशिष्ट उपपान has started giving mathematical error. Say if Page names are ABCD/1 ABCD/2 ABCD/3 If start parameter is defined as 1 (example:....|start=1|end=22) it actually starts from page no. 0, it displays ABCD/0 on its own. If I creat a page ABCD/0 and define start parameter 0, it displays ABCD/-1 on its own. We wish if start parameter is from 1 then it should start counting from ABCD/1 only and not ABCD/0

Requesting guidance to solve issue from template experts Rgds.

Mahitgar (talk) 05:00, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

You can use the updated Template:Random subpage from this wiki. This now uses Module:Random, which gets rid of a lot of the problems we used to have generating random numbers in template code. For example, it removes the need to manually set a seed in order to generate different random subpages on a single page. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 10:09, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Special:UserEmail not working

I have tried to use the email function with different users and they have also tried to use it and found that it is not received by the recipient. In addition the confirmation to the sender is not returned. Thank you Janvermont. Janvermont (talk) 13:47, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Is the sender's email address from either yahoo or gmail? If so, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 129#Is "Email this user" on the blink? and the threads linked back from there. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:31, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

URL changes when I am on a redirect

When I type a redirect Google maps I see /wiki/Google_maps but then it changes to the target Google Maps /wiki/Google_Maps. Other redirects are a different story, I type in TV /wiki/TV but then URL changes to /wiki/Television . It tricks me all the time. Is there something wrong, could this be fixed or something? — Preceding unsigned comment added by A Great Catholic Person (talk • contribs) 18:57, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

This is probably done in purpose. If the URL didn't change, then you would see "TV" in the URL and "Television" in the text. Users wouldn't be sure of which is the correct one. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:50, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 129#Redirects to sections and Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 47#Why did this happen? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:39, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

User:Thryduulf made a comment on this change. It's on Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals.A Great Catholic Person (talk) 02:26, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

New design?

Does Wikipedia have a new design on the letters? They seem different now since earlier today. A new format or whatever. When I do edits it seems like the format (or what it is called) are different.--BabbaQ (talk) 18:01, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

@BabbaQ: Looks the same for me. Did you recent switch skins? Vector has different typography from Monobook and you may be picking up on that... although it doesn't change the edit interface, only the read interface. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:14, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

No, I have done absolutely nothing different byt the letter type has changed to a smaller and a little thicker type than the earlier one. Anyway, at the end of the day I will turn off the computer and see if it is still different tomorrow. --BabbaQ (talk) 18:16, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

I can not really say that it bothers me because everything looks the same (kind of) when I read/watch articles but when I start edit the letter type has changed. I edit Wikipedia using Chrome. hmm.--BabbaQ (talk) 18:17, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Without knowing what browser you use, it's hard to tell... You may have accidentally changed the font size with your mousewheel (while hitting CTRL), in that case, press CTRL-0 to reset it. It may also be that your browser has updated and is now using DirectWrite to render the text. Some have complained it looks too different and have disabled it. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:45, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, that was previously discussed on Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_129#Font. This is probably the issue here, too. Matma Rex talk 19:28, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

I fixed the problem. I used the Cleartype to change the font back.--BabbaQ (talk) 21:22, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Problem with Wikipedia and Cleartype

Does anyone else here has the same problem as I do, I have to disable Cleartype for Chrome everytime I want to edit on Wikipedia. Or else the letter are so small and a little thicker than they should be. Very strange. Now I have disabled Cleartype and the letter looks just like on the articles themselves. But do I turn it on again it returns to these strange looking letters. And it happened from one moment to another. Very odd.--BabbaQ (talk) 15:07, 4 September 2014 (UTC)--BabbaQ (talk) 15:07, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Whanever Chrome acts up like that, it helps to clear its cache (menu > tools > clear browsing data). -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 23:04, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I did that now. It did not help. It is another font text style when I edit articles. it is thicker and smaller text but then when I am on a Wikipedia article just reading it, it is the same font as usual. It just happened two days ago from one visit on the computer to the next. When I edit on explorer it is not this problem, but I prefer to be online through Chrome so it is a bit annoying :)--BabbaQ (talk) 13:23, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Can't help you then. The only thing you can do is force the preferred font via your personal CSS. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 16:41, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Having same problem as BabbaQ. Changing Personal CSS is not helping at all. I tried everything mentioned above but nothing works.--Jockzain (talk) 17:52, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Chrome settings tweak option

Another option, which I was directed to, was to change font settings in Chrome. Go to settings, enter "font" in the search settings box, click on "customized fonts" and tweak your settings. To get my editing font and size back, I set the "Fixed-width font" to Courier New. I also tweaked the other settings to suit my wants/needs. Hope this helps! Londonjackbooks (talk) 01:02, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

AFD helper script

There is a helper script at User:Mr.Z-man/closeAFD to aid AFD closers. There are several requests for improvements on the talk page but Mr. Z-man does not seem very interested in replying to them. Would anyone be interested in producing a fork with some of the issues addressed? SpinningSpark 22:04, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

As it happens, a couple users have already asked me to extend this to other kinds of XfDs, and I'm working on it. I'll see if I can incorporate your requests, too. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 22:09, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks a bunch for that. Is there a page I should be watching for this? SpinningSpark 23:55, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Eh, not really; I'm working on it offline at the moment (much, much easier to edit). Probably User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/closeXFD.js, if I had to guess. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 23:58, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

In that case would you be kind enough to ping me when its done? Thanks. SpinningSpark 09:20, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Just in case anyone here hasn't discovered this, you can watchlist redlinks. It's possible that my watchlist contains a couple of RFC/U pages that I suspect may be created some day.

Of course, in this case, that trick won't help you if the script ends up on a different page, but it's something to consider. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:31, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I actually started a rewrite of the script at User:Mr.Z-man/closeAFD2.js. It's basically 99% done. There's just a few issues, mainly related to positioning of the oldafdmulti template that I haven't had bothered to fix yet. (see User talk:Mr.Z-man/Archive 15#closeAFD feedback). It's mostly just less-horrible code, but it does add a few new features like multi-article AFDs. Mr.Z-man 20:31, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Altered number sign

Look at this:

Where has that squiggly sign come from? I typed a simple number sign, (#). You can still see it if you put this message into the editor. It doesn't stop the link from working.

DOwenWilliams (talk) 03:06, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

It is the typographical section symbol, and # denotes an internal link, so the section symbol was probably added as a nicety. I too have noticed it, but made the mental rewrite, so it did not bother me. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 03:12, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. It doesn't bother me either, but I'd like to understand it. It appears when I use the "See also" template, but I haven't noticed it when I use others.

What is special about "See also"? DOwenWilliams (talk) 03:39, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

It is one of a few hatnote templates that have been converted to Lua, using Module:Hatnote. There is code in this module that automatically converts hash characters into the squiggly section link marker. — Mr. Stradivarius on tour ^{♪ talk ♪} 06:40, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Fancy !! —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 08:56, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

And how many of our readers will understand that? It looks like a bad ampersand to me. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:45, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't know about readers, but it's a standard typographical symbol for "section". See Section sign -- phoebe / (talk to me) 23:50, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I would think more readers would understand § rather then #. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 17:06, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

More might, once they get used to it. But this is the sort of display that needs to be consistent. If it's going to change, there are a number of help pages that need to be modified. DGG ( talk ) 03:51, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

What happened to MonoBook skin?

In the middle of an edit several minutes ago all the styles disappeared and the page turned wonky. I can't preview page layouts anymore, just content. I prefer to use the MonoBook skin. Has this happened to users who prefer other skins? — Quicksilver^{T @} 17:01, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I just tested the other skins and they all are missing style sheets. This doesn't seem to be happening in the German Wikipedia, just the English Wikipedia. It looks like the site is unusable until whoever caused this undoes their "fix". — Quicksilver^{T @} 17:05, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Same. I changed to Vector with the same result. However, this seems to only happen when I am logged in. The page loads normally when logged out. Reso lute 17:06, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Same problems here. Its been slow loading for everything. As I was looking at stuff it appears that they are rolling out a new display on the "diffs" where the changes are all marked with visible red line changes. Probably something to do with that. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 17:10, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Whew, seems normal now. Changed back to MonoBook, and all is right with the world, once again! Reso lute 17:13, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I can confirm the problem only exists for me while logged in. — Quicksilver^{T @} 17:11, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Pages not loading properly

This is intermittent, but some pages are loading incompletely or with a lot of the styling missing. It has been happening for around 10 minutes or so. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 17:01, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Same here. It seems like some or all of the style sheets are not loading.- Mr X 17:07, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

It's a known issue. Happens on all wiki's atm. --Stryn (talk) 17:09, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Now working for me (MonoBook). --Redrose64 (talk) 17:52, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Unlikely, but I am generally wondering if this is about Firefox, and about Monobook.js. If that was the case, it's related to bugzilla:69924. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

I had problems on Friday morning (PDT) in Safari with Vector, so this is presumably not the bug you're thinking of. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:31, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Definitely a different bug, I had problems around the time of the initial report on Monobook/IE9, with about 80% of page loads not including styling. Risker (talk) 05:43, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Ah, found more info: Quoting from discussion in Operations: These were issues (missing JS/CSS) with Bits which started around 16:33 UTC due to a serialisation of requests for one specific uncacheable URL which was extremely slow to render and piled up requests. For more details, this should become an incident report this week. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:41, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata language linking error

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72415

I want to link the article Youku Tudou to the Chinese-language counterpart zh:优酷土豆集团. So I use the "link with page tool", select the language and enter the article, and am told this: "An unexpected error occurred: $1. Details Invalid token" I try the opposite, from the Chinese wiki, and am told this: "发生意外错误：$1。详情 Invalid token" (same meaning) I don't understand. Could someone able file a bug report for this? Kind regards, --Tom (LT) (talk) 09:38, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Fixed I've merged the duplicate items to Wikidata:Q8057770. However, this can very well be a bug. Could someone file a bug report? Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 13:38, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

It's a bug. It's happening on all new pages I create that have an article on another language wiki. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 17:38, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

The same problem for me. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:57, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

It will be fixed tomorrow (Monday). --Stryn (talk) 16:36, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Problem with adding interwiki links

Hi, I'm having a problem with the "Add links" feature. On Iuliana Măceșeanu trying to add the link to it: yields an error popup saying "An unexpected error occurred: $1" (I quote). Details are "unvalid token". On Anna Limbach the gadget first mentions that the page is already associated to an item on the Wikidata central data repository; clicking on "confirm" yields the same popup as above. The problem occurs both with the latest Google Chrome (version 37.0.2062.103 m) and Firefox (32.0). Jastrow (Λέγετε) 17:56, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Apologies for the duplicate, I did a Google search before posting, but didn't think of doing a Ctrl+F on the page itself. Jastrow (Λέγετε) 20:36, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

VE and changing ref. content

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72548

I was using VE to make some minor changes in Cockscomb pearl mussel. I added to Wikipedia links within the text with-out any apparent objection from the VE program. Then I added a comma in one of the references already listed. This brought up a message that I was trying to edit in source mode. I added another comma and a space in refs. and then tried to save. I could not directly. VE told me I could transfer to source editing by going to the drop-down menu next to "Save Page." I searched and searched, but I could not find "Save Page." I was unable to move any-thing except at the top menu bar, where I hit "Source edit" and was able to continue and save my edits. Now, re-enacting this experience for this note, I got the same thing after putting an (now redundant) comma, but by a fluke I clicked on the note telling me that I was using the wrong mark-up and - voila - I saw the "Save Page" button. Sorry, but the idea of clicking on the message to remove it in order to find the "Save Page" button is obviously not intuitive to me. But then I tried again to replicate my problem. This time (with-out having done any-thing different except backing out, I did not get the forbidden-territory message. (I am using Firefox Moxilla adn Windows 7.) Kdammers (talk) 00:25, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

You got the wikitext warning when you edited the "Bogan" reference. It contained four single quotation marks '''' in a row, which the software interprets as two single quotation marks for italics, plus two spares. Then VisualEditor looks at the two spares (which you didn't add, but which it checked because you did other things on that line) and decides that someone's typing bad wikitext. Which, I guess, is true; it just wasn't you who typed the bad wikitext. There's already a request on the list to not hassle people about pre-existing wikitext problems. It's apparently a fairly complicated thing to do, but I'm hopeful that we'll get it in the end.

I'll tell them that you want a more obvious close box on the wikitext warning. Thanks for posting your thoughts on this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:55, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Error creating thumbnail

Resolved

Does anyone know what's going on with File:Belt trick 1.gif? The server does not seem to want to generate a thumbnail of the new (cropped) version of that image. I get an error message "Error creating thumbnail: Error code: 137". Sławomir Biały (talk) 13:58, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

[[File:Belt trick 1.gif|thumb|click icon on the right to see the belt trick]]

generates a thumbnail for me under Firefox 31.0, an empty box with the caption, and a widget which displays the belt trick after I click it. It does not show an error message. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 16:09, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Additional information: I have Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups installed as one of my preferences. When I hover over the link, a popup box shows a miniature belt trick, as well as the usual summary description of the image or article. This tiny image is animated. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 19:11, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I assume the GIF is too large to properly generate a thumbnail, see Commons:Maximum file size#Maximum size for thumbnails. Size of a GIF is calculated as width x height x number of frames which is about 28 MegaPixels for your image. --Patrick87 (talk) 16:21, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, that seemed to be the problem. Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:45, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Non-English sister links

I can use [[:s:Example]] to link to a page on Wikisource, but how do I link to a page on the French Wikisource? Neither [[:s:fr:Example]] nor [[:fr:s:Example]] work. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:44, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

They both work for me. s:fr:Example and fr:s:Example both go to https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Example (a non-existing page). What happens when you click those links? PrimeHunter (talk) 16:02, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Neither works for me, the first link goes to https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/fr:Example; the second goes to https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/s:Example. Thanks, though. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:52, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

That's where they start out. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/fr:Example and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/s:Example both redirect to https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Example for me. Maybe your browser doesn't follow redirects for some reason. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:24, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: I didn't realise that; all good now. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:29, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Page view statistics

Page view statistics have not been updating since Sept 2, and User:Henrik has not responded to queries on his talkpage. Abductive (reasoning) 17:24, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-37

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

VisualEditor news

From Thursday, Internet Explorer 11 users will get VisualEditor. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [6] [7] [8]

Future software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf20) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 9, and on all Wikipedias on September 11 (calendar).
You will soon confirm a "Thanks" inline instead of in a dialog. [9]
You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs. [10]

Problems

There were problems with JavaScript and CSS on Friday, September 5 because of a code error.

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

09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

A bug in the improved diff view

Hey everyone! Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in the recently reworked improved diff view, which is by the way much better than it was before! Here are two examples where differences aren't correctly displayed:

added article link isn't recognized (here's also a screenshot)
added vertical whitespace isn't recognized (here's also a screenshot)

Hope it helps, as there's obviously something wrong. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:26, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@Dsimic: This is about wikEdDiff, right? It might be better to report this on the talk page there, not all tool maintainers watch the village pump. Matma Rex talk 17:53, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Right, it's about wikEdDiff. Thank you very much, Matma Rex, for pointing out where the issues should be reported! — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

This has just been fixed (version 0.1.11 of User:Cacycle/diff.js). Thanks for reporting. Cacycle (talk) 20:16, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Once again, thank you for fixing it so quickly! — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:17, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

No-break hyphen

I've been editing Cucurbita and I noticed that "(bottle-)gourd", which appears twice in the article, broke at least in one instance at the end of a line between the hyphen and the close-parenthesis. Another editor suggested using ‑ to create a no-break hyphen. I tried it, in the lead of the article, but the hyphen that resulted looks both shorter and lighter than a regular hyphen. Is there any way to make that hyphen look more like a regular hyphen, or is there another code that could be used? If there isn't, I'm thinking about changing the whole thing to just "bottle-gourd" and forgetting about the parentheses. CorinneSD (talk) 15:52, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

{{nowrap|(bottle-)gourd}} renders as (bottle-)gourd. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:03, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! CorinneSD (talk) 16:44, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Problem with coordinates and Centralnotices in Monobook skin

In Monobook, the coordinates (for article with coordinates set) and the CentralNotice banner overlap. This is bad especially with the WLM banner, as the coordinates are (at least for me) overlapping the image and thus unreadable. See MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css for an example. The German Wikipedia seems to not have this problem. —Kusma (t·c) 15:55, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

As a note, this problem also occurs with the {{Attached KML}} template. - Floydian ^τ _¢ 17:04, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Backlinks counter for Wikipedia articles?

I've been backlinkscount.py by Dispenser, but it's finally stopped working completely. Does anyone know if there is an alternative tool available for obtaining a count of Wikipedia backlinks to any given article via an API?

Any advice much appreciated! Regards, NavinoEvans (talk) 18:48, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

dead-end message

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72497

The following was posted on my talk page after I tried to answer a question at The Teahouse.

---

Below is the message I asked about that I could not explain adequately for you to respond:

Error

Insufficient permission to access the content.

Return to Main Page.

[5013507b] 2014-09-06 14:17:50: Fatal exception of type Flow\Exception\PermissionException

So how can I learn what this message is that I receive in my inbox? Continuing thanks.TBR-qed (talk) 14:31, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

---

— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:05, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Can you tell me what the following alert means, and how I should respond? Thanks.TBR-qed (talk) 18:37, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Error

Insufficient permission to access the content.

Return to Main Page.

[86715f22] 2014-09-06 18:33:54: Fatal exception of type Flow\Exception\PermissionException

@TBR-qed: That error is from following a link to a deleted topic. I've filed bugzilla:70497 for the message to be changed to something clearer. Thanks for the bugreport. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:07, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Trouble with notifications

Just to see what it might bring I checked the "Flow" box at Notifications in my Preferences. Six days ago I got two messages: "Fram mentioned you in their post in "Copy of real Teahouse discussion" on "Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page". When I click on the message I come to a page with "Error. Insufficient permission to access the content. [9f97ff2e] 2014-09-07 22:37:01: Fatal exception of type Flow\Exception\PermissionException". Fine. But since I can't access the thing the messages want to link to, the Notifications for them won't go away, they just stay there blocking all other notifications. This is getting a bit irritating. What can I do to get rid of them? Could I be granted access for a couple of minutes or something, just to be able to acknowledge the notifications and make them go away? The "Flow" box is unchecked now. Please help, w.carter-Talk 22:44, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@W.carter, DannyH (WMF), and Quiddity (WMF): When the "Messages" panel in your Echo notifications is opened, is there a little "Mark all as read" link in the top right?--Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 23:03, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@Erik Moeller (WMF):No. I've been looking for one but no luck. I have to click on >> All notifications to see the new message hidden "underneath" the two stuck messages. I have also scanned that page for some "Mark all as read", to no avail. The "normal" notifications are mentioned as "Alerts" and the two troublesome "Messages". w.carter-Talk 00:23, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

W.carter, User:Quiddity (WMF) is probably going to need to know what your browser and computer OS are, and maybe skin (usually Monobook or Vector), if he needs to file a bug report. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:48, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

User:Quiddity (WMF), I use Vector, Explorer 11 and Windows 7. If there was a way to do it, I could send you a screenshot of how the Echo notifications looks when opened. w.carter-Talk 10:17, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Btw, I also logged on using Crome. No difference. w.carter-Talk 10:23, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@W.carter: See WP:WPSHOT. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:31, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Here you go: File:Screenshot of notification bug at Wikipedia.jpg. w.carter-Talk 12:05, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@W.carter: Thanks for the details and (nicely highlighted) screenshot. The Messages you've got visible there, have already been read, hence the "mark all as read" link is not available. The "Alerts" tab should be visible by default, when there are no new unread messages or alerts, but that is currently not the case (filed as bugzilla:70461, and should be fixed on Thursday or possibly tomorrow, Pacific time). Ditto for fixes to the styling of the tab-links (black for active, blue for inactive, which is bugzilla:69929) Hope that helps, and sorry for the trouble. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF):Thanks! Fingers crossed then... And don't apologize, I pretty sure you did not do this. :) The Gremlins are everywhere. Best, w.carter-Talk 19:34, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF):Notifications back to normal and working fine. Thanks! :) w.carter-Talk 07:19, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Flow notifications RFC

I have started an RfC about the Flow notifications at Wikipedia talk:Flow#Formal request to roll back the change that introduced the "messages" to Echo. All opinions welcome! Fram (talk) 17:20, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Notifications Problem

If I get one or more notifications, and click on the number to view them, what I first see is two notifications on the Flow developer page that I don't have the privilege to view. How do I turn off getting these silly notices? Can I submit a bug report? Robert McClenon (talk) 17:20, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

You can join the RfC I just started (see section above this one :-) ). In your preferences, you can disable Flow at the "notifications" tab, but I prefer a solution that works for everyone at once, hence the RfC. Fram (talk) 18:14, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: That's bugzilla:70461, which has an almost-finished patch, and will be fixed either Thursday or tomorrow (Pacific time). Sorry for the trouble. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

I still have a question. Why am I going ONLY to the Flow notifications, and why am I getting notifications that I don't have the privilege to view? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:15, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Robert McClenon, click on the RfC above and that might help answer your question. Clicking on "All notifications" at the left-hand bottom corner should show you all the non-Flow ones as well. Dougweller (talk) 20:38, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Font issue

I noticed a few days ago that the lower-case "w" appears lighter than the other letters (not in edit mode) on my computer. Is there anything I can do to fix this? CorinneSD (talk) 16:52, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

It's extremely unlikely that Wikipedia can do anything about that - or even that it's Wikipedia's fault. We just tell the browser "display this text in this font at this point size" - and the browser (or more likely, your operating system) is responsible for turning that in to the right set of pixels. My guess is that you're using some kind of antialiased font and the slope of the diagonals of the 'w' is causing this kind of effect. Really, nothing is going to change here in wiki-land to 'fix' this - so your best bet is to change the font you use - or alter the point-size of the font in your browser. SteveBaker (talk) 15:55, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

O.K. Thank you. CorinneSD (talk) 16:14, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Auto-subst

There are several templates that should always be substituted ({{subst:welcome}}, {{subst:uw-vandal1}}, etc. So, if they should always be substituted, why should we have to type subst to do it? This makes a lot of common templates much more cumbersome, and causes unnecessary hassle for editors.

{{subst:welcome}} is much tougher to type than {{welcome}}
{{subst:mytalk}} is much tougher to type than {{mytalk}}
And the list goes on....

So, why not have these templates substitute even when we don't use "subst"? Suggestion:

Create a magic word or something called {{ALWAYSSUBST}}. This would be placed at the top of templates that should always be substituted
When the software processes a template call, if it sees {{ALWAYSSUBST}} in the template code, it will substitute it, even if the user didn't type "subst".
On the rare occasion that these templates need to be transcluded for some reason, the format {{transclude:welcome}} will ignore the {{ALWAYSSUBST}} and transclude it.

The {{ALWAYSSUBST}} would only be used on templates where there is no debate that is should be transcluded, since I know there are some where editor's aren't in agreement.
An additional advantage is that this allows template code to be simplified since it no longer has to check if it's substituted. The Mediawiki software itself could generate the warning message about transcluding the template. I know this distinction is very important for template coders and technically-inclined editors, but for the vast majority of us, we just want templates that work easily without trouble. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 22:16, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

We already have a bot that does that, and it's not possible to make MediaWiki itself do it, because it doesn't look at the content of templates until it's already too late to subst them. Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:18, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

What bot and how quickly does it change it? And if I place {{mytalk}} on some guys user page, will the bot wind up listing itself as the one who placed the talkback? Or will take long enough that some other user will edit the page and the template will list that person? In short, will it still work? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 22:27, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

And finally, my request is obviously to change the Mediawiki software so it can do this, if this is reasonable possible. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 22:27, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

User:AnomieBOT/docs/TemplateSubster. Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:53, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Whenever I add {{welcome}} to a talk page, the bot always seems to substitute the template within an hour. If you add {{subst:uw-test1}}, the template includes your user name. If you get the bot to substitute the template for you, the substituted template contains your user name, not the bot's user name. However, that probably breaks if some other user edits the same page before the bot does it. --Stefan2 (talk) 14:36, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Realizing I'm really asking two questions, I created the sub-sections below. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 22:39, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Is this a good idea

Most things in a wiki should be reversible. If a template temporarily gets the magic word inappropriately and is substituted in lots of places, it would be a mess. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:17, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
- Or imagine if this existed during Meepsheep's template-vandalism spree. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:52, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
Would limiting the switch to admins and template editor's be a solution to this type of problems? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 00:02, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
- To an extent, yes, but another problem is that it adds yet another way that the PST isn't idempotent (or in layman's terms, makes it possible that an attempted null edit would actually result in a real edit). Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:14, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Is this technically possible

As I said above, no, it's not. Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:53, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Indeed it isn't. It could be possible if the information about whether to subst: the template was stored externally somehow (definitely not in article text, but some magic property somewhere). Matma Rex talk 23:39, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

By the way, there actually already exists syntax for {{transclude:welcome}}: {{msg:welcome}}. It's generally not used because it doesn't do anything useful. (You could use it to force MediaWiki to use a template rather than a magic word, but you can use e.g. {{Template:PAGENAME}} already and it's more intuitive.) Matma Rex talk 23:39, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/index.html

Background: If I enter the URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/zebra", or "https://wikipedia.org/zebra" or even "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/zebra" I get a 404 page that helpfully redirects me to the English language Zebra article after a 5 second pause. That's a nice touch!

However, it has an unintended consequence. If I inadvertently create a web link to Wikipedia's main page using https://wikipedia.org/index.html or https://wikipedia.org/index.htm or https://wikipedia.org/index.php - I get redirected to the relatively obscure, technical article Webserver directory index (via the redirect index.html or whatever). This is not such a useful behavior! For non-english speakers, it's a disasterous consequence!

I think most people would expect http://wikipedia.org/index.html to take them to the main page.

In case you doubt the depth of the problem, it's interesting to note that the index.html redirect comes up as a remarkably frequently-accessed page. In 2008 it was the 5th most visited page in the entire encyclopedia - with the only actual article to beat it being the one about the 2008 Olympic games! I don't really believe it was of such massive interest to people back then - more interesting than Sarah Palin? I don't think so! So it must have been that people were getting there by mistake...and with 4.5 million visitors (a lot for 2008!), that was a HELL of a lot of confused people!

I'm betting that it's still mostly being hit precisely because it's being found by mistake - or because some kind of spidering software is expecting to find the main page there.

It's quite possible that some relatively stupid spidering software is missing Wikipedia altogether because it's reaching the 404 page and giving up...and this might easily have a significant impact on our Alexia score and the ability of some communities of user to find us at all!

IMHO, we should change that 404 page to treat "index.html", "index.php" and "index.htm" as special cases and redirect you to the main page (preferably without the 5 second delay) instead of this rather obscure article!

SteveBaker (talk) 15:28, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Aside from the pages http://en.wikipedia.org/index.html and the other two, what would be affected by this proposal? It sounds good, a "why didn't we do this before" situation, but I'm curious if you can imagine any consequences for other pages. I can't, except of course for a reduction in the hits for the webserver directory index article. Nyttend (talk) 20:50, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Index.html had ~2.7 million views in the last thirty days alone (see [11]). Special:HideBanners is even worse than that (see [12]) and that page is nothing more than a broken image afaict. There a dozen or so "mysteries" like these that seem to be "padding the count" on all the wiki projects; not just WikiPedia. The last time I brought it up, it fell on deaf ears to put it mildly so good luck with this one. At best, they'll add it to the existing filter(s) and subtract it from the total "count" after the fact. -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:32, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not even slightly concerned about screwing up the statistics. I'm concerned about 150,000 people being pointed to the wrong page every single day! SteveBaker (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree that special-casing those three suffixes on the 404 page sounds like a good idea. I'd rather not change the index.html, index.htm or index.php redirects on-wiki, as they might be useful to people who are actually looking for those articles. But those users are a fraction of a percent of users who are currently being redirected to Web directory index, so I wouldn't be against changing the redirect targets if the 404 page can't or won't be changed. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 01:16, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Doing the 404/redirect when you hit wikipedia.org/index.html is a Wikipedia-specific thing - it's not done by other MediaWiki's. So there is evidently some special magic going on to make wikipedia.org/xxxx redirect to the xxxx article. I think the special magic should be modified to specially redirect it to the true Wikipedia home page. That has essentially zero downsides. A tiny fraction of users will be trying to find Zebra by typing https://wikipedia.org/zebra - and a microscopic fraction of a fraction will be trying to get to Webserver directory index using that mechanism - and an even smaller number will be doing it by trying to get there via the index.html/php/htm redirect using this rather bizarre/non-standard/incorrect mechanism. Balance that against 2.3 million people per month for index.html, plus 2.2 million more going via index.php and 20,000 more going to index.htm. By comparison, Webserver directory index got only 4,600 views in the same period of time - so it's safe to say that almost all of those 4.5 million hits were errors.

Our main page gets 10 million hits a day - and this incorrect page gets hit 150,000 times a day by people who are clearly trying to get to the main page. So about 1.5% of our users are going to the wrong place!!

But it must actually be far worse than that. The numbers from stats.grok.se are the number of hits on the index.html redirect article...there must be far more people hitting the 404 page and giving up before the 5 second timeout takes them to index.html.

I really think it's worth sticking three "if" statements into that 404 redirect code to eliminate this problem. There is zero downside here. The coding effort will take someone no more than 10 minutes to enact and 10 minutes more to test. The evidence is compelling - we just need the right person to spend a half hour to fix it. It's well worth that much effort to help 1.5% of our potential readers reach the home-page!

Actually, I think the consequences are a little deeper than a huge number of confused users. If you look at the daily stats for index.htm - you'll see that the number of hits per day hardly ever changes...it's 680 per day. That says to me that some automatic mechanism - probably one or more web spiders - is searching there and hitting that 404. Correcting THAT could have far bigger benefits - who knows how many of those 4.5 million screwups (if fixed) would increase our rankings on various search engines, data aggregators, news feeds and so forth?

We could go deeper and wonder why https://wikipedia.org/Bonjour takes you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour and not (for example) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour ? But that's another debate. The issue here is fixing this large-scale issue with people being sent to this bizarre page when they have every reasonable expectation of being sent to the main page. Ask *ANYONE* who knows the slightest thing about computers where 'https://wikipedia.org/index.html' will take you - and not a single one of them will suggest index.html.

This needs to be fixed. SteveBaker (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Change in renaming process

Single-user login (SUL) finalisation's goal is so that every Wikimedia editor has a single, recognized global account with one username across all projects. As you may know, after a long delay, it's now underway as an effort between bureaucrats, stewards, and Wikimedia Foundation engineers. This will also allow for development of cross-wiki tools like global notifications and watchlists. There is no set date for the completion of single-user login finalization at this time.

The process involves changing all rename processes into one global renaming process. The ability for local bureaucrats to rename users on this wiki will be turned off on Monday, 15 September 2014, as one of the first steps. Global renamers are in the process of being created to make sure projects and languages are represented by the time this occurs. I sent a note to every bureaucrat about this process three weeks ago with an invitation to participate and many have begun requesting to be a part of the group. Together with the stewards, the global renamers will be empowered to help editors work through the often difficult process of getting a global name.

In parting, visit Special:MergeAccount to unify your account if you have never done so. If your local pages about renaming still need to be updated, please do so and consider pointing people to m:SRUC for future rename requests, especially if this project does not have bureaucrats that hold global renamer permissions. If you have any questions, you can read more on the help page on Meta. You can also follow the technical progress on mediawiki.org. Contact me on Meta any time with questions as well. Thank you for your time.

-- User:Keegan (WMF) (talk) 16:22, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Did you mean X?

Just an update — I've added something to {{No article text}} and MediaWiki:Newarticletext, the contents displayed whenever you go to a title that doesn't exist. For some time, Commons has had a feature on their equivalent page that asks you "Did you mean PAGETITLEs" if they have a page whose title is identical except for an "s" on the end. For example, going to Commons:Category:Churche asks you "did you mean Category:Churches?" It doesn't display if no such category exists. It's so helpful that I've decided to port it over here, and you can see it in action at Category:Buildings and structure, for example. Nyttend (talk) 23:04, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Heh. My first thought was to add a check for a missing closing parenthesis, but I see that's already been addressed. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 18:18, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Unwatch confirmation

Why are we suddenly being asked to confirm an unwatch of a page? That is an annoying second click to have to make. SpinningSpark 00:34, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't have to click again to confirm an unwatch. Dustin (talk) 00:36, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

It only happened the once, perhaps someone was testing something. SpinningSpark 00:58, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

That may happen if the JavaScript fails to load. Jackmcbarn (talk) 01:17, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Problem with kml template

I have just dropped a Points of Interest table onto Louth Navigation. It uses the PoIgb templates and is in exactly the same format, as far as I can see, as those on hundreds of other canal articles. (See Beverley Beck for a really small one). However, when I click on the "Map of all coordinates from Google" (which is the visualisation of the kml template), it reports that it not a valid KML or KMZ file. I have never had to do anything other than drop the table onto an article before, so presumably, the actual KML or KMZ file gets generated somehow. The Bing option fails too, but I have checked several other articles at random, and they all still work. Is there anything else I need to do in order to make it work? Bob1960evens (talk) 18:50, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

It seems to work for me. Jackmcbarn (talk) 18:53, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

This seems to be the same issue that I reported to Para (this tool's maintainer): User_talk:Para#kmlexport_broken_for_some_specific_URLs. That particular case fixed itself a some hours after he did his magic. Matma Rex talk 19:27, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

I've been away, but it seems to be working now. Thanks. Bob1960evens (talk) 22:12, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Cannot dismiss banner

The current banner for the Summer of Monuments does not include something to click on to make it go away. Could someone please fix that? I'm getting tired of having to look at it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:37, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

The banner seems to be this CentralNotice, which is controlled from Meta. So you would have to go to Meta to get the banner itself fixed. The banner uses JavaScript for the close button, and cookies to remember whether you closed it already. Do you have either of those turned off? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 01:41, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I allow cookies, and I suspect it must be my JavaScript settings (which probably explains why the rest of the Wiki isn't up in arms about it). I've dealt with it for now by setting my user preferences to turn off banners, and if the absence of the button is just due to my own security settings for Java, then I don't think I need to bother anyone else about it. Thanks again, that was very helpful. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:47, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

@Tryptofish: That banner doesn't have a close button. You need to click on the background of the banner to disable it. --Glaisher (talk) 04:59, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, I tried that, but it did not work for me. Not sure why, because I tried clicking all over the background, to no effect. But I'm not unhappy about it, because I can control it from my user preferences. Just fyi, my opinion is that it would be more user-friendly to simply have a close button. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:45, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

@Tryptofish: You are right. It did not have a close button. Initially, I was testing on a ?banner=wsm_final url and thought that when the background was clicked, it went away (what actually happened was the CN script was slow and made me think that it was not loaded). The close button icon lead to a 404 page. I've now fixed it. --Glaisher (talk) 16:45, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much for fixing it! --Tryptofish (talk) 21:12, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

A few questions

Hi! I was pointed in this direction because of Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Rakesh biswas01. I just had a question: is it possible to have an alert come up if I (an admin) were to move something to a protected page? The reason behind this is that long story short, I came across a page via speedy that had an assertion of notability. I was going to nominate it for AfD instead and also saw that the page's creator had also created an entry for Rakesh Biswas, which was listed as Rakesh.Biswas. I moved the page, as I didn't see anything immediately come up in the search bar (the prior article re-creation attempts had been back in March) and the page did have an assertion of notability. Now I will say I should have actually gone to the page for Rakesh Biswas to see the protection- I'm not saying I shouldn't have checked a little further, but it did make me kind of think that a small warning would probably be a good idea for admins making page moves. I'm thinking just a warning akin to how we'll have the "are you sure" thing for page moves that would delete a history or something like that- just something to alert us that we're moving an entry to a page that has been protected due to repeated re-creation. It's not a biggie or anything, but it might not be a bad thing. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 03:48, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

There isn't currently such a feature, but that's something that I've wanted for a while as well. At some point I'll try to get it added to MediaWiki. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:44, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Pipe trick problem with cite.php

I just noticed that WP:cite.php seems to have developed a problem handling the pipe trick. See the following using [[National Statistics Office (Philippines)|]] inline and in a footnote: National Statistics Office^[1]

^ [[National Statistics Office (Philippines)|]]

Am I seeing this correctly as a problem? Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 20:24, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

This is old. See Help:Pipe trick#Where it doesn't work and bugzilla:2700. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:06, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Possible image page bug

King County Metro calls File:King County Metro logo.svg in its infobox, yet the "File usage" section of the page shows "No pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file." As this is a non-free image, this has caused someone to tag it for speedy deletion (a tag which I removed before it could be carried out). I'm at a loss as to what could be causing this—I purged the page and it's still not showing as in use. If it were a free image, this wouldn't be much of a concern, but I'm afraid the copyright guardians are going to keep helpfully tagging this for speedy not knowing that it's in use. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 23:38, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Disregard...a null edit to the article fixed the issue. —Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 23:44, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Media Viewer Consultation Results

Thanks to all contributors who participated in the recent Media Viewer Consultation!

The Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team appreciates the many constructive suggestions to improve the viewing experience for readers and casual editors on Wikimedia projects. We reviewed about 130 community suggestions and prioritized a number of important development tasks for the next release of this feature. Those prioritized tasks have now been added to the improvements list on the consultation page.

We have already started development on the most critical ('must-have') improvements suggested by the community and validated through user testing (see research findings and design prototype). We plan to complete all “must have” improvements by the end of October and deploy them incrementally, starting this week. See the multimedia team's improvements plan and development planning site for details.

As we release these improvements, we will post regular updates on the Media Viewer talk page. We invite you to review these improvements and share your feedback there.

The foundation is also launching a file metadata cleanup drive to add machine-readable attributions and licenses on files lack them. This will lay the groundwork for the structured data partnership with the Wikidata team, to enable better search and re-use of media in our projects and many other features. We encourage everyone to join these efforts.

This community consultation was very productive for us and we look forward to more collaborations in the future. Thanks again to all our gracious contributors! Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 01:11, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Mobile IP contribs - is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

Why does the mobile version of any IP's contributions show all changes by IPs? For example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/98.220.200.76 shows a whole lot of edits, when that IP (me from a few years ago, if you were curious) has only 4 edits.—LucasThoms 01:44, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

@Lucas Thoms: Looks like a bug to me. I filed it for you, and you can check it at bugzilla:70757. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 06:03, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

@Lucas Thoms: The bug has been fixed. It takes some time for things to propagate, so you probably won't see the fix actually live until Thursday next week. If it's not fixed by the end of next Thursday, let me know. Thanks for reporting this! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:54, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Look into a bot's function

I hope this is the correct place to get some help regarding this. Apologies if it is not. I was hoping someone with bot knowledge could investigate Theo's Little Bot's Task 22 (to populate data on film articles that utilize {{Rotten Tomatoes score}}). The bot has not made a positive contribution to a template subpage since April 17, 2014, with the few attempts at the end of August/early September 2014 producing the template's error message. I have personally created a template subpage for use on a film page (Guardians of the Galaxy (film)), in hopes of intially "kickstarting" the bot to come by, but soon realized that I would have to manually update it (as seen in the edit history). I have attempted to contact the bot's owner, Theopolisme, as well as Technical 13 as they have previously helped with the template/bot, but did not receive any answer from either. I'm hoping someone here can look into the bot's operation, the code, and how the task is being executed, to find out if the bot is the problem, or possibly Rotten Tomatoes' API has changed, preventing the bot from working as it needs to. This bot was really helpful for updating this data, and it will be a shame (though not the end of the world) if the task no longer works. Thanks in advance. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 04:17, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Note: I just found WP:BON and will post there as well, but I guess it would not hurt to have this here either. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 04:21, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Also drop a note on WT:FILM - I seem to recall this being mentioned there before. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 10:18, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Will do. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 15:02, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Anyone? - Favre1fan93 (talk) 05:19, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Link FA and Link GA

Hello, I'm using my bot to remove them in several wikis (including English Wikipedia). I almost finished them in English Wikipedia and I think the rest is better to be done by hand. First of all these articles have both Link FA/GA for one language (which is obviously wrong):

Please check them and fix them. Thank you :)Ladsgroup^overleg 10:44, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: all fixed, but I left the badge on Historical revision of the Inquisition because there is still the sitelink. I'm not sure is the es-wiki article about the same thing than the en-wiki one. --Stryn (talk) 18:10, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

cite doi disappearing in the PDF version of article

Please check out Meridian arc. This uses constructions like

In 1837, [[Friedrich Bessel|Bessel]] obtained one such series,<ref>{{cite doi
|10.1002/asna.18370142301
|comment = Bessel 1837
|noedit
}}</ref> which was put into a simpler form by ...

This works fine in the resulting article; the reference is cited as a superscript and the DOI citation is given in the list of reference. However, if I "Download as PDF" the article, the citation and the reference have completely evaporated. What happened? Is there some way to refer to cite-doi articles which allows the reference to appear in the PDF version. cffk (talk) 17:24, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

This is a bug in the PDF rendering software. I believe there is a complete rework on this. -- Gadget850^talk 17:59, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

@Cffk: It's not specific to {{cite doi}} - no templates work inside <ref>...</ref> when the page is converted to PDF. More in the archives for this page. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:43, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Anybody aware of an existing ticket in Bugzilla? Could not find one searching for "ref" and "template" in the "Collection" extension. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 18:24, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

@AKlapper (WMF): bugzilla:44552 I think. -- John of Reading (talk) 19:55, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

bugzilla:46115; mw:PDF rendering; Help:Books/Feedback (and its archives); Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 116#PDF output of Wikipedia Page is Missing its References; Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 124#Re "Download as PDF" function; +others. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:16, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

AFD is broken

I've been trying for 15 minutes to open today's AFD listings, but I get a message that the server is overloaded. Such an overload is not evident when I open any other page. It says "Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2014 September 12 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia < Wikipedia:Articles for deletion‎ | Log 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. Timeout waiting for the lock" What does "timeout waiting for the lock" even mean? Edison (talk) 23:18, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I think it means the read lock in the database. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 23:56, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

No, it means PoolCounter isn't issuing you a lock for the parse for that page. It's designed to prevent too many concurrent parses of the same page. That AfD log page renders for me now, so I wouldn't worry too much if it's showing for you as well (these errors are almost always transient). If the timeouts do persist, maybe file something in Bugzilla so someone can have a look at it. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 04:46, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

It's been quite a while and I still get the same error message. How can one page, the current AFD listings, be the only overloaded page? Edison (talk) 17:30, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

It comes up now after a long delay. In many years of following AFD, I have never seen it to be this off-and-on. Edison (talk) 19:34, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Common.js dangerous?

On top of the common.js page I recently created, there is an automatic message that 'Code that you insert on this page could contain malicious content capable of compromising your account.' Could malicious users take advantage of this? Bever (talk) 21:02, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Only if there were a malicious admin, since I can't edit your page. And we all know admins are always nice friendly people. --NE2 21:14, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Okay, so it is a protected page, thank you. Bever (talk) 21:37, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Bever, I believe everybody has that on their js page. It's a generic message that appears at the top of all js pages. — Maile (talk) 21:45, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it's a generic message, and it also appears on .css pages. The MediaWiki software has no way of knowing whether a fragment of JavaScript is nice or nasty - so it plays ultra-cautious. This does put some people off the idea of setting up custom JS/CSS.

As for protection: .js pages in User: space are only editable by admins and by the specific user whose space the page is in; .js pages in MediaWiki: space are only editable by admins; .js pages in User talk: or MediaWiki talk: namespace are not JavaScript pages at all, but regular talk pages, so can be edited by anybody. The same rules apply for .css pages. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:08, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, there is always the possibility that someone tricks you into installing a backdoored or even actively malicious script into your common.js (a Self-XSS attack, similar to the infamous Facebook scam). So you probably should not put random code you find on the internet in there, or import scripts without verifying that it does what you are told it does.

In practice though, nobody cares. — Keφr 12:11, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

WikiData edits showing up in watchlist

So apparently there's a setting in the watchlist to show WikiData edits. This is not checked in my preferences, but yet today my watchlist seems to have started showing such edits. I tried turning the setting on and then off, but no dice. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 01:09, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

That's odd, the feature works for me. However, if nothoing else works, use this link. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:24, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

....well I apologize, this is PEBKAC. I accidently clicked on the "show Wikidata" link on the watchlist and was refreshing that. Thanks anyway. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 05:13, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Problem with edit tabs

Since late this morning, something has gone wrong with the edit tabs to individual sections of the Talk Page in Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant: they have disappeared. The problem started at the section headed "Success or name change?" here. Our editor-cum-boffin on the page is in a different time zone, so can someone sort this out for the editors asap, please? --P123ct1 (talk) 14:19, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

It's because of an unmatched "{{" in an earlier section (the one before the section you link to) being matched with a "}}" in the newest section by the software. Hhhippo just fixed it. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 129#Section edit links missing for a similar previous thread. SiBr₄ (talk) 14:50, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for finding the closing ones. They should probably be deactivated, too, but I'm not sure what was intended there. Looks like an incomplete copy and paste from the article page. — HHHIPPO 15:09, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

It is a quote from the lead of the associated article. In the article, the part from "The group is also known" to "be used colloquially" is part of an endnote which uses the {{efn}} template. The editor who copied the lead to the talk page apparently removed the opening "{{efn|" along with the first sentence of the note. SiBr₄ (talk) 15:19, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing the problem, much appreciated. --P123ct1 (talk) 15:48, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Template request: CFD

Please would someone edit template:Cfd so that it prompts the editor to subst it? (see e.g. [13]) – Fayenatic London 19:44, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

As I understand it, you want the template to find out whether it is being transcluded or substituted, and to show a "This template should be substituted" notice if it is being transcluded. I am fairly sure this is possible using Lua, though does anyone know whether it can be done in wikitext as well? SiBr₄ (talk) 20:20, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I just found a template called {{ifsubst}} that should help. I'll do some tests with it at {{Cfd}}'s sandbox page. SiBr₄ (talk) 20:27, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

@Fayenatic london: See {{Cfd/sandbox}} and a testcase at my sandbox. If that is what you wanted I'll change the actual template. SiBr₄ (talk) 20:46, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks very much, that's neat. It's a great deal better than the mess which appears if you use {{afd}}! Please make it live. On further inspection, I see that cfr, cfm and cfs do not display a warning of this type either, so if you have the time and inclination to do those as well, that would be much appreciated. You might even like to make AfD clearer.

I've just realised there is also a related {{cfc}}, which does have a warning but using a different format. – Fayenatic London 22:55, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Done all category templates. I must agree that the code of {{Afd}} is kind of a mess, though what it returns if actually used is not too bad. SiBr₄ (talk) 23:20, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks again! – Fayenatic London 12:44, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Mobile talk

When browsing articles on the mobile site or through the mobile app, the icon that is meant to link to the talk page is absent. I've tried several different browsers, different devices, logged out vs logged in - nothing, and it's been nothing for several weeks. A couple other people have reported a similar issue at WT:Flow; I don't know how many people this affects, as some obviously do have the link there. Nikkimaria (talk) 23:30, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I've never seen a talk page link from an article on the mobile site - I thought that was how it was supposed to work. Personally, I would appreciate a talk page link as that's often what I want to see. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 06:20, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Based on screencaps like this, there is, or at least was, an icon that links to the talk page. I've never seen it either, but then I only looked for it within the past couple of months so I couldn't say whether it's ever been there for me. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:33, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

@Nikkimaria: If you're on the mobile site and you go to settings from the left navigation menu, you can turn on the beta settings. Then you'll be able to see a link to discussions on articles. If you go back again and turn on the experimental mode, you'll see something similar to what was shown in the screenshot. There is presently no way to access talk pages on the app, except by searching for them using the search bar at the top of your screen. Hope that helps. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 06:10, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

So why are we allowing editing but by default not allowing easy access to talk pages? Particularly for new or not-logged-in users who may be unaware of how to go about following the processes you mention to access them? Nikkimaria (talk) 14:22, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Because the mobile group hasn't made making useful contributions to Wikipedia a priority. So far, it's a "look at the pretty section headers ... see how they open up when you click them?" kind of thing. No talk pages, no watch lists, none of the things needed to be a serious contributor are available. Right now, the best thing to do on your mobile device is to find the little button at the bottom that allows you to access the desktop version and press it. What would be nice would be if they added a preference that allowed you to disable the mobile editor completely so that you didn't have to find the desktop button every few weeks.—Kww(talk) 14:42, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Does that mean that mobile editors can't get to their own User talk: pages? --Redrose64 (talk) 14:56, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Actually, it looks like I was just being stupid. There is an icon to get to the talk page (the two speech bubbles), but I don't think I ever tried pressing it. I probably thought it was for Echo notifications or something. @Kww: the watchlist has been implemented on mobile for quite a while now (at least on iOS which is where I've been using it from). I don't see any way to get to the page history though. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:31, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Mr. Stradivarius, per Deskana, that icon is only present in beta/experimental for the mobile site, and not at all on the mobile app. My question is why that is, if the argument is that mobile editing is something we should be promoting. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:34, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I just realised that, and was just going to post about that, actually. (I should have read Dan Garry's post properly in the first place.) I had opted into the beta a few weeks ago, which made the talk page icon show up, but somehow I didn't notice that it was present. Or, more likely, my mind just glossed over it the same way that I skip over ads. Not that I'm saying that it looked like an ad, just that I somehow didn't register that it was important. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:42, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

The watchlist on mobile was a list of recently visited pages, the last time I looked. It wasn't my actual watchlist.—Kww(talk) 16:00, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

@Kww: There are two tabs at the top of the mobile watchlist, list and modified. It sounds like you've been looking at list. If you click on modified, you'll see the normal watchlist view (i.e. the equivalent of the watchlist on the desktop site). — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 16:25, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The watchlist on en.m.wikipedia.org is useless. There is a watchlist star at the top of the page – but the star is only shown when you are logged out! If you log in, the star automatically disappaers. However, the main problem is in my opinion that the mobile version lacks an edit button. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:27, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean that it shows an icon instead of the word Edit? There must be an edit button, because people are making thousands of edits on mobile every day. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

There is neither a button nor an icon. If I manually add "?action=edit" at the end of the URL, I am redirected to "Special:MobileEditor/{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}", where it says "Redirecting to editor..." but I am never redirected to any editor. --Stefan2 (talk) 13:56, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Stefan2, when I go to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random (on my laptop), I see an icon at the right-hand edge of every section heading that looks like a pencil. Clicking on that takes me to a page that looks like an editor (filled with wikitext for the section). Do you not see any pencil icons? The first pencil icon is just to the left of the star (which I do see when I'm logged in).

Can you tell me what browser and hardware you're using? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:16, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Opera/9.80 (Android; Opera Mini/7.6.35766/35.4295; U; sv) Presto/2.8.119 Version/11.10 --Stefan2 (talk) 19:38, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

With the beta settings there's a link to the talk page, and from there to add a new section, but not to add a new comment to an existing discussion; the icons that function as edit links visible when visiting the talk page directly or via a link are missing. Withdrawn (talk) 19:04, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Changing the interface texts for users who have Wikipedia configured for British English

Recently, a user complained that, when trying to move a page to a target where an other page already existed, the message didn't refer him/her to WP:RM; thgis user has the language setting to British English (see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive264#Cut and paste move, User talk:DuncanHill#WP:RM Link). How can that be fixed? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:35, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

You could create Mediawiki:Articleexists/en-GB with the content of Mediawiki:Articleexists (with the required spelling etc changes, if needed). Right now, the default translatewiki:MediaWiki:Articleexists/en-GB message is shown to users with en-GB set as their interface language. --Glaisher (talk) 04:48, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I fixed it. It's not the first time that messages set locally for en-CA and en-GB are wildly incomplete and even misleading. Is there a way we can standardize everything across the board, and/or disable these two potentially unecessary language variants? I can understand en-GB for the many spelling differences with en-US (called just "en" because we're definitely not biased in favor of the US...), but the core of the MediaWiki messages themselves should not be different. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 05:21, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Also, @Glaisher:, Mediawiki:Articleexists/en-GB would not work. MediaWiki:Articleexists/en-gb does. According to Mr. Stradivarius who originally taught me, it has to be lowercase; my own experience confirmed that. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 05:23, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I recently experienced a similar problem due to the inconsistency between MediaWiki:Editingold and MediaWiki:Editingold/en-gb - see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_129#Out-of-date_revision_warning. DH85868993 (talk) 05:42, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

There are three options for fixing this that I can think of. The first is to fix the Mediawiki software so that messages in language variants like en-GB and en-CA fall back to custom messages for the main language before they fall back to the default language variant messages. This makes sense for enwiki where we have lots of custom messages telling people about our procedures, but it might not make sense for other wikis or other languages where the difference between language variants is greater. There's probably a bug in Bugzilla about this somewhere if anyone wants to look. The second option is to write a bot that automatically synchronises MediaWiki messages for the en-CA and en-GB language variants. That's the next best choice if this can't be fixed at the MediaWiki level, in my opinion. The third option is to remove the en-GB and en-CA language variants entirely from Wikimedia wikis. While this would make sense from an enwiki perspective, it is quite an extreme option and other wikis would likely object. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 06:15, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Just get rid of the whole en-gb/en-ca thing on all wikis and for those users who have selected one of those, have them fall back to vanilla en. I'm British, but have had my language pref set to "en" since about day seven, which is how long it took me to realise that the discrepancies between the help pages and what I could see (such as the "New section" tab in MonoBook, which was the default skin at the time) were mostly down to the language setting. I have yet to come across a system message where the difference between "color" and "colour" is important enough to justify two messages. British people understand Americans perfectly well, except when somebody suggests to "table the motion". Heck, we've had American-language ~~films~~ movies in this country for about 90 years, and have never needed to get the soundtrack dubbed. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:30, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

This issue often comes up but nothing has been done so I have added "Your language setting British English is not recommended" to MediaWiki:Preferences-summary/en-gb which is seen by en-gb users at the top of Special:Preferences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences?uselang=en-gb. I did similar for Canadian English at MediaWiki:Preferences-summary/en-ca. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:32, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Could you add "because our software just isn't up to the job" to that? Otherwise it can read like an admission that Wikipedia is for Americans first, and the rest of us as an inconvenient afterthought. DuncanHill (talk) 10:41, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that's relevant enough to always display at top of Special:Preferences when "not recommended" already links to an explanation. And if we really wanted to, we could create lots of en-gb and en-ca messages without needing software changes. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:51, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Can the variant messages not juat translude or redirect to the main message? This will keep them synchronised without a bot. I've just done this with MediaWiki:Articleexists/en-gb. I'm not sure if it work work with parameters ($1, $2, etc.) though. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:07, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

It will work for some but not all of them, depending on how the code calls them. It's probably not a good idea even where it does work; instead, we should fix the software to be more reasonable about how it handles it. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:43, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks PrimeHunter. I have been told that there is a problem relating to fallback languages, which explains why, despite having my preferences set to en (or possibly en-GB) on other language Wikis, not all of the menu items are displayed in English. Has this been fixed? If not is there a Bugzilla number I can follow? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:39, 11 September 2014 (UTC).

Maybe bugzilla:1495 or links there are relevant. I don't know which cases you have in mind but I would guess en is generally safer than en-gb or en-ca. Some menu entries are added at local wikis and not part of MediaWiki. The local wiki would have to make translations but rarely does. Also note that some namespaces like Portal and local variants are added on an individual basis (many Wikipedias don't have a Portal equivalent), so the same applies. Technically, the English Portal: and the French Portail: isn't the "same" namespace so there is no translation unless the French create one at fr:MediaWiki:Nstab-portail/en to supplement fr:MediaWiki:Nstab-portail (even the name of the MediaWiki message is in French). Portail=Portal is easy to guess but other cases can be harder. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:26, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

This does not only affect variants of English. If you change the language setting to some other language such as Swedish or French, you also get the default interface messages without the local modifications. Anyone who understands American English should preferably not fiddle with the language settings. --Stefan2 (talk) 14:38, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

British English is the fourth most selected language per Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences, after Spanish, French and Indonesian. -- Gadget850^talk 10:24, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Doesn't mean that they made the right choice, though. How many would find Wikipedia more difficult to understand if their language was plain en? --Redrose64 (talk) 10:39, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Agreed, after all we're only talking about the interface messages not the text of articles. Different issue altogether when you bring Wikidata, language variants and infoboxes, etc., into play. QuiteUnusual (talk) 10:45, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I keep my interface language set to Dutch, and avoiding all the local customizations is one of the primary benefits of doing so. As for the English variants, why not a bot to keep the templates up to date? Unless, of course, there are people that set it to en-gb just to avoid English Wikipedia's verbose nature.—Kww(talk) 13:42, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I've seen a couple of posts from people saying that this is their purpose, but I don't know if it's common. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:51, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I actually searched the MediaWiki namespace for the words "center" and "color" (probably the only relevant words here); for "center", we have pages like MediaWiki:Customusertemplate-ACP2-Be a part of Wikipedia (Biology, Organizing) in names of articles; both words are used in javascript or formatting (both css pages and inline formatting), but this is invisible to the user; otherwise, there's no more than 4 or 5 of each. I doubt that many usres would be confused by these minour changes. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:09, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

A search of the MediaWiki namespace only finds pages where a message has been created at the English Wikipedia and not cases where the MediaWiki default is used. I don't know any cases where the English Wikipedia has created en-gb messages with British spelling as alternative to the spelling seen by en users. At Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 115#Erroneous message on Watchlist I wrote about the MediaWiki defaults:

"It appears from mw:Localisation statistics that only 51 of 2979 messages have an en-gb variant. I found https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/html/MessagesEn_8php_source.html and https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/html/MessagesEn__gb_8php_source.html. The latter appears to show all en-gb variants. Here is a possibly complete summary of differences between en and en-gb: uncategorized/uncategorised, [former difference omitted], "$1"/‘$1’ (different quote characters in many messages), color/colour, canceled/cancelled, vandalized/vandalised, Kilometers/Kilometres, meters/metres, digitize/digitise, program/programme, License/License. So for a few British spellings and different quotation marks, users with en-gb lose hundreds of customized messages at the English Wikipedia." PrimeHunter (talk) 16:33, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I just want to add that there is en-gb, but also en-ca. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 16:37, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

There are four different flavours of English: "English", "Canadian English", "British English" and "simple English". The "simple English" option is sorted under "S" in the list of languages at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal whereas the other ones are sorted under "E". Luckily, you can't select "simple British English" or "simple Canadian English". --Stefan2 (talk) 16:50, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

There is simple English, yes; but that has its own Wikipedia, whereas the other two variants do not. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:59, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

That's unrelated. simple: appears to use "English". I'm talking about uselang=simple, i.e. the language setting at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal. --Stefan2 (talk) 19:41, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I have made a request for a synchronization bot at WP:BRQ#MediaWiki synchronization bot. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 17:04, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

What do we do about the 30,000 Spanish users? -- Gadget850^talk 17:21, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

The proper solution would be to translate all custom messages to Spanish, French and other languages, but this is unlikely going to happen. A solution could be to copy MediaWiki:Preferences-summary/en-gb to the corresponding interface messages for the most selected languages. Users who do not understand English would not want to switch to English, but it would still help some users. Users who do not understand English at all probably do not have much use of this project. --Stefan2 (talk) 17:39, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

What we should do is make a list of the most important message customizations (10-15 of them), and translate them into as m any languages as possible with the emphasis on the most selected languages. I can't help with these languges, unfortunately. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 02:58, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks

Is there a difference between those attempts to "thank" that show a pop-up, and those that open a new tab?
Can I suppress the confirmation dialogue?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:33, 11 September 2014 (UTC).

No
The confirmation step (which was requested by the community because of significant problems with misclicks), is supposed to change methods soon, so it would presumably be more effective to wait until the new interface is settled before trying that. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

You can test the new in-line version on mediawiki.org. Still not perfect (best would be to offer undo, and otherwise send with small delay), but a bit nicer than the modal.--Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 19:35, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Oh we're actually adding that confirmation step? Ugh. I know you guys get yelled at either way, but that's crappy UX inserted to cover what is likely a pretty uncommon (what was the evidence it was significant?) and benign use case. Protonk (talk) 19:50, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

The confirmation step isn't being added, because it's already there, and has been for months. It was added after a number of people were accidentally thanking bad edits because the "thank" link is right next to "undo". --Redrose64 (talk) 19:59, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I suppose if you don't want the confirmation, you shouldn't have to have it (if some sort of gadget is practical), but it definitely needs to be an option, due to the accidents that Redrose mentions. Nyttend (talk) 23:45, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I definitely do not want that extra step. If it's made default, make in opt-out at least. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 14:07, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

It already is the default, see my comment above. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:47, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, and if it remains that way, I want to opt-out, and I hope that we won't wait for some savvy user to make a custom script/hack to forcibly allow editors to opt-out of the confirmation step. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 17:47, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree but a custom hack would be cool now!
And I am still wondering why sometimes "thank" pops up a box, and sometimes "thank" opens a new tab.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:37, 15 September 2014 (UTC).

I think it's always supposed to be a box, but if there's a JavaScript failure (incl. a slow connection), it falls back on new tab. I sometimes get something similar when I watch/unwatch a page: normally I get a little box 'The page "Xxx" has been added to your watchlist ...', but sometimes it goes to a near-blank page (in the same tab) containing the 'The page "Xxx" has been added' text plus the usual tabs and menus. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:01, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Dispenser's other tools

Now that there has been a rewrite of Reflinks, are there any volunteers to do a workable Labs version rewrite of Dispenser's other tools:

1) Dablinks, checks an article to see for inadvertent dab links

2) Dab solver

3) WebChecklinks, Checklinks/config/doc

4) Watcher, Tool for checking amount of watchers on a certain page

— Maile (talk) 16:03, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

@Maile66: Are there any descriptions of what the tools do (or used to do) anywhere? That would definitely help potential authors who are mostly active on other wikis and never used these. I wrote some disambiguation link fixing tools back in the day for other-language Wikipedias, I could probably adapt them, but I'd like to know what is the expected functionality before I spend my time only to learn it's unwanted. Matma Rex talk 17:44, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Matma Rex, hope the above links help. Dablinks and Checklinks are currently a tool on the DYK Nominations template, but I think others also use them. — Maile (talk) 18:56, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

For frame of reference, dabsolver is (or was) a fantastic tool for fixing disambiguation links. Opening a page in dabsolver would bring up an edit screen where all disambiguation links on the page would be clearly highlighted, and clicking one of those links would bring up the list of all of the options on the disambiguation page, including their explanatory text (along with an option to unlink, or to tag the page with {{dn}}). The fix could be selected by clicking the preferred link. There was an algorithm of some kind built in that put symbols next to certain options to indicate that they were the most likely option (for example, on an article with a link to heavy metal, if the article was about a music group, then the listing of disambiguation options would have a lock symbol next to the option for heavy metal music, while if the article was about a geoscience topic, the lock symbol would be next to heavy metal (chemistry). After fixing a one or more links on the page, clicking save would port the changes over to a regular edit window. bd2412 T 21:16, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

@Maile66 and BD2412: The functionality of Dablinks seems to have been fully replicated in MediaWiki a few months ago as mw:Extension:Disambiguator, primarily thanks to Kaldari. My tool has functionality very similar to Dab solver, although more limited – it presents a list of disambiguation links on any given page, listing possible corrected link targets (+the ability to unlink or change link entirely) and allowing you to jump to the place in the article where the links appear. When you bonk the button, you're also redirected to normal wikitext "Show changes" edit view. Looks like this: [14]. It also doesn't require anything external like the Toolserver or Labs, so it's not going to go down. I'm going to finish translating it and put it up here as a user script, perhaps you'll find it useful and maybe someone will want to add the missing features. Matma Rex talk 21:45, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Better still, maybe someone (@JaGa:, @R'n'B:, since I don't know who has the technical access to do this) will make it the default fix provided when we generate lists of links to be fixed. bd2412 T 22:05, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

The thing is live now, at User:Matma Rex/disFixer, with the usual installation instructions. The code isn't exactly a marvel of engineering, but it works reliably. The original version is at pl:MediaWiki:Gadget-disFixer.js, I modified it to disable pl.wp-specific features, add localisation support and clean it up a bit. Matma Rex talk 23:26, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Is rdcheck.py threatened? It's still up. --NE2 19:04, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Possibly, WMF Staff seems to have it in for me. "Blocked excessive API usage" or some bullshit they'd come up with. — Dispenser 04:31, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

@Maile66: I find WPCleaner to be a great tool for disambiguation (instead of Dab solver & Dablinks). GoingBatty (talk) 02:13, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

It's a shame that the tool requires Java which is a security nightmare—a standard user installing Java will probably not be aware how easy it is to be owned by malware. Johnuniq (talk) 02:27, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Dab solver works again with new API code, but the extra functionality (relatedness, suggested red links, category birth/death) is unavailable without the database connection. — Dispenser 04:31, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

If you need something to fix links to dabs, Popups works well. --NE2 03:32, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

TopBanana has some nice tools that address some of these issues in a different way. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:39, 15 September 2014 (UTC).

There's Bug 57617 for exposing the watchlist table on Labs. Labs is basically suppose to be an SQL version of the API. If we're lucky, a watchlist_summary table with the suggested 30 limit hard coded into it will be available. I doubt we'll see anything like active watchers or unwatched pages by WikiProjects again. — Dispenser 05:52, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Mathjax stalls loading GreekAndCoptic.js

I have Mathjax turned on by default and generally this works great. However on some pages (an example is great-circle distance), the Mathjax generation stalls with "Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/SVG/fonts/TeX/Main/Regular/GreekAndCoptic.js" and I am left looking as crufty PNG renderings of the math. The problem seems to be platform specific (I'm using Firefox v 32 under Linux, Fedora 20) and I have seen similar miscellaneous complaints (specifically concerning GreekAndCoptic.js) on the web, but with no definitive answers. The following paragraph triggers the problem with my talk page (and the problem goes away if the Delta is changed to delta). I would be really nice to know what is going on here and how to avoid the problem.

On computer systems

\Delta {\mathit {\Delta }}

done.

Thanks! cffk (talk) 17:28, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I've investigated the problem some more. Any uppercase Greek letters seem to trigger the problem. However you can inoculate a page by inserting a mathit version of an uppercase Greek letter first (swap the two Deltas above to check). The problem exists also with Firefox v 31 on Fedora 19. The problem occurs whether or not the stix fonts are installed. cffk (talk) 19:41, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Great-circle distance renders correctly for me (no image fallback for MathJax) and generation doesn't stall. Firefox 32 on Fedora 20. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't have a problem with that page. I'd try asking on the MathJax google group as I'm not sure its a problem with our setup.--Salix alba (talk): 16:20, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Does VE impose a wikitext layout style?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T57461

I noticed an edit (diff) which had "added comma for clarity" as the edit summary and Tag: VisualEditor; the edit added 2,681 bytes. Checking the diff shows a massive number of changes to templates with parameters like |p=428 getting a space inserted on each side of =, and other fiddling. Did VE make those changes? Johnuniq (talk) 04:13, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for this Johnuniq. I think this is a VE bug! AAldousari (talk) 04:21, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, this isn't supposed to happen. VE doesn't let you customize the "code style" of content you add, but it doesn't mess with existing wikitext that wasn't changed in the edit. @Aldousari: What browser are you using? Have you done anything out of ordinary during the edit? Matma Rex talk 09:02, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Aldousari, are you using Microsoft Internet Explorer 11?

Bug 55461 is actually a problem in Parsoid, which sometimes needs to make things be officially correct. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:36, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Broken wikitext

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72875

I'm investigating why {{convert}} gives strange output when given a certain kind of invalid input (a wikilink instead of a number). The issue boils down to what the following wikitext does. It's supposed to show a message in a link, with another popup message with more detail when the mouse is held over the link. The following shows the wikitext in pre tags, with the same wikitext underneath.

*hello [[Example|<span title="&#91;&#91;abc&#93;&#93;">convert: invalid number</span>]] world
*The following link [[The End]] stops the link from the previous line!

hello convert: invalid number world
The following link The End stops the link from the previous line!

Why is "The following link" linked to "Example"? Holding the mouse over the "convert: invalid number" link shows a popup message: [[abc</a>. Where did the </a> come from? I think I checked that convert gave a sensible message without these problems a few months ago, so possibly something in MediaWiki has changed? Johnuniq (talk) 10:19, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

The reason "The following link" (and "world") is linked to Example is because of the </a> in the title text: the parser is seeing the ]] as the end of the wikilink and putting the </a> in there instead of after the </span> where it belongs. Thus the browser doesn't actually see the end-of-link, and everything up to the next link (or other link-terminating bit of HTML) gets counted as part of the link.

I checked similar wikitext in my local installation back to a version of MediaWiki from April, and it rendered the same way. Then I googled around for a random third-party wiki that was still on 1.19 (and then one on 1.12.4), and it too rendered the wikitext the same way. But I don't see any recent change to the modules behind {{convert}} that would affect things, either. Anomie ⚔ 12:58, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, and sorry for the trouble because I'm not really sure what testing I did a few months ago. Johnuniq (talk) 02:13, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: I've opened bugzilla:70875 about it. Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:27, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Johnuniq (talk) 01:34, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Template, magic word, etc for number of sections/headings in a page?

Hello – Is there a template or magic word or something else that returns the number of sections in a page (as identified by headings using the standard equals-signs formatting)..? Apologies if I'm missing something obvious. Sardanaphalus (talk) 11:03, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

There is not, and we can't add one. Imagine if there were, and a page contained something like {{#ifeq:{{NUMBEROFSECTIONS}}|0|== Section header==}}. Jackmcbarn (talk) 16:18, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

If that happenned, then any time the page were edited, it would toggle on or off. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 20:02, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Worse, it would toggle every time the page is parsed. Though similar wikiparadoxes are already possible. Consider a page containing {{#ifeq:{{PAGESINCAT:Foo}}|0|[[Category:Foo]]}}, where Category:Foo is an otherwise empty category.

I'd imagine though that, in principle, a Lua script that counts the number of instances of ==...== on a given page wouldn't be hard to create. SiBr₄ (talk) 21:21, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Easy: just type __TOC__ at any spot on the page, and then preview. It will display the table of contents, and since the sections are numbered in the TOC, you'll get what you want. Nyttend (talk) 12:08, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

That, however, isn't something like a magic word or template to which reference could be made e.g. on the page itself, or another template, etc. Thanks, though, for trying to think of something – and to SiBr{{semisub|4}} for the Lua suggestion. Sardanaphalus (talk) 09:02, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Something like a "Loop detected" message, I suppose, so I guess a template rather than magic word would be required. Sardanaphalus (talk) 09:02, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Search input window contents disappear on iphone

Hi!

Would someone please point me to the discussion (I'm sure there is one but I couldn't find it) about search terms disappearing after the search on an iphone 4s ios7.

Problem: after a search, attempts at refinement (or more likely a typo) of the search term(s) blanks the search input window and the whole thing has to be retyped. This seems to be a WM-specific problem. And very tedious.

Thanks. Saintrain (talk) 18:32, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Saintrain, are you using Safari on your iPhone, or some other software? User:Maryana (WMF) deals with Mobile Web support. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Whatamidoing (WMF). Yes, Safari. (I have a choice? :-) Would User:Maryana (WMF) like me to/mind if I contact her directly? Saintrain (talk) 22:02, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Feel free to contact her directly. In my experience, the two best ways to reach her are leaving a message on her talk page or sending e-mail to her.

I'm not sure what the status of editing on iPhones is for Mobile Web; perhaps editing is only available on iPads (and desktop users who click the 'Mobile view' link at the bottom of the page). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I contacted her. (I'm not trying to edit, as such. Tried that. No thanks. It's when I try to re-search for a topic, I have to re-enter the search terms. The slightest touch on the search window/bar/field/whatever clears the text, never to return.) Saintrain (talk) 01:01, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72890

Thanks for the bug report! I filed a ticket for it in Bugzilla so the devs can take a look at it. And yes, editing is very much available on smartphones as well as tablets :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Problematic username

What is wrong with this username: ro:user:Țetcu Mircea Rareș? It's not parsed correctly by some tools, for example: http://tools.wmflabs.org/quentinv57-tools/tools/sulinfo.php?username=%C8%9Aetcu+Mircea+Rare%C8%99 --XXN (talk) 23:33, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

The problem in that example is that the tool isn't passing the encoding for an mb_substr call, so it's mangling the "Ț". Quentinv57 should be able to fix is easily enough. Anomie ⚔ 11:32, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-38

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

Recent software changes

You can now change the style of links to disambiguation pages. This is done with the mw-disambig CSS class. [15] [16]
There was a problem on right-to-left wikis with Wikidata log entries. The text was messy in watchlists and recent changes. The problem is now fixed. The same problem will be fixed soon for user names. [17] [18] [19]
New users are randomly chosen for a test on 12 Wikipedias. They get messages with ideas of articles to edit. The ideas come from what they have already edited. [20]

Problems

There was a problem with loading images on September 10. [21]

VisualEditor news

If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number. [22]
The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet. [23] [24]
You can now use help buttons in the "Page settings" menu to see what the options are for. [25]

Future software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf21) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 16, and on all Wikipedias on September 18 (calendar).
These changes are coming with the new version:
- If you use Internet Explorer 7, JavaScript will no longer work. JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work in that browser. You should update to a newer browser. [26] [27] [28]

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

08:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Categories not showing

I've just created an article, Paola Drigo (my 398th). For some reason only the hidden category shows but none of the regular categories. Likewise the stub tag is not showing, and the article is not appearing in any of the categories I've added:

{{DEFAULTSORT|Drigo, Paola}}

[[Category:1876 births]]
[[Category:1938 deaths]]
[[Category:20th-century Italian writers]]
[[Category:Italian women novelists]]
{{Italy-writer-stub}}

Voceditenore (talk) 09:27, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

To editor Voceditenore: - fixed it for you, there was a slash missing from a refname. See the diff here. DuncanHill (talk) 09:40, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Duncan! What an idiot I am.:) Best, Voceditenore (talk) 09:44, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Invisible bits of pages are often caused by typos in ref formatting, have done it myself plenty of times! DuncanHill (talk) 09:49, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Bracket glitch

U.S. Route 23 in Ohio#Major_intersections Can anyone figure out where the extra right brackets at the top of the page are coming from? I can't figure out where. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 11:58, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I see no such thing there. Screenshot? Matma Rex talk 12:50, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

This edit seems to have fixed it somehow. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 12:51, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

It appears there were two stray "}"s after the Crawford Township row within the table, which Sardanaphalus commented out with the linked edit. SiBr₄ (talk) 13:01, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Browser hangup on particular page

Hello everybody! Recently I encontered a very strange problem with one particular page: Madrid_Atocha_railway_station If I'm trying to view it via Opera 12.17 on 32bit Windows, my browser freezes during loading of the page or some embedded elements in it. I've encountered this problem on two different PCs, while in Firefox 32.0 it renders normally. It is a very strange, as I've never seen such behaivor with hundreds of Wikipedia pages and the same page worked fine in my browser at least in April 2014. I suppose it is something to do with embedded CSS or JavaScript, but I can`t see nothing suspicious in its source code. P h n (talk) 13:41, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

@P h n: I can't reproduce the issue on Windows 7 (64-bit), using 32-bit Opera 12.17. I can open and read the page with no problems, both logged in and logged out. Do you mean that the entire browser crashes, or is it just the tab that becomes unresponsive and can be closed? Can you reproduce when logged out? Matma Rex talk 15:47, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I have the same situation whether I'm logged in or not. My browser simply eats up all available CPU and becomes unresponsive. I could not close only the one tab because of it. Address tab usually show "Elements: 5/5" when this happens, but sometimes the same can happen in other moments during loading of that particular page. And yes, with antivirus and firewall disabled the result was the same. P h n (talk) 18:29, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, I have played a while with a locally saved copy of that page and my problem looks like a kind of rare browser bug. It occurs only when my PC already has a high CPU usage (and I`m loading it very often, one fully loaded core and another at 10-60% is my normal everyday job) and the exact piece where my browser locks up in rendering is this piece of code:

So its really a 1 Mb PNG image which fails to load.P h n (talk) 13:02, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Banner keeps reappearing

Win 7 / IE 11. Same problem for me as at "Cannot dismiss banner" above. When I close the "Wiki Loves Monuments" banner (click on the "X") it goes away, but every time I open a new page it reappears. Cookies are enabled for wikipedia.org.* This feature (one click to dismiss banners permanently) has always worked correctly for me in the past. This is the first time I have had this problem. Nothing relevant has changed locally, as far as I can think. Any ideas? 86.155.130.164 (talk) 20:57, 15 September 2014 (UTC) * Just to be on the safe side, I tried temporarily enabling all cookies for all sites too, but it made no difference. The banner still keeps coming back.

Oh, OK, I forgot to try deleting cookies and local cache. Now I have done that it seems to be working properly again. 86.155.130.164 (talk) 23:59, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

For me clicking the x on the banner would cause the page I was viewing to reload, with the banner still visible. Clearing the cache didn't work, but clearing cookies did. Of course that meant I had to log in again, and dismiss again all the other banners that I had already dismissed and that the cookies I had just deleted were keeping me from seeing. Quite annoying. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:46, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Having the same issue, using FF28.0/Windows XP. Problem popped up after I cleared my cache and cookies/temp files. - Neutralhomer • Talk • 06:35, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Same here, clearing cookies (at least Wikipedia ones) doesn't help. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:39, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, please fix this. Although it's a relatively innocuous banner, I still would prefer the clutter gone. In my case, when it first appeared, it had an "X", and when I clicked that it went away. Then it reappeared (yesterday?) and now clicking the X doesn't work - it instantly reappears. Microshit rebooted my computer in the interim, that may have messed with my cookies and caused the change in behavior, but we should still be able to dismiss these things. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:46, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

For me, not only will the banner reappear after I click the X, clicking the X also causes my browser to navigate to the main page. So if for instance I click the X to close the banner on this page, I will end up at the main page with the banner still in place. Calathan (talk) 17:56, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Looking into this now. We just deployed a CentralNotice update that removes a dependency on jquery.json, instead relying on resourceloader's native JSON shim. This may be the source of the problem in certain browsers EEggleston (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Same in Safari. BlueMoonset (talk) 19:02, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

This should now be fixed. There must have been a request at just the wrong time yesterday, while the php on the enwiki server was updated and the js on the bits server was not. So a mismatch ended up in the cache server - no jquery.json functions loaded, but the old version of bannerController.js trying to call them. Touching and re-syncing the js file seems to have updated the cache. 166.170.33.188 (talk) 21:18, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Back button broken after page restore

Further to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 129#Redirects to sections and related threads. I occasionally come across what looks like a bug in the URL-changing feature, not connected with linking to sections. What I did was this:

Went through my watchlist, spotted an entry for the deletion of Talk:Greenway Halt railway station which was a redlink at the time, having just been deleted in error
Clicked on that redlink, which took me to a page headed "Creating Talk:Greenway Halt railway station"
Clicked the link in "View or restore one deleted edit?"
Restored the page, which having previously been a redirect, now once again became a redirect. The page displayed was Talk:Greenway Halt railway station (Gloucestershire), with the note "Redirected from Talk:Greenway Halt railway station"
Clicked that link to get to the redirect proper, edited to remove the #REDIRECT [[]] and add some WikiProject banners, then saved it.
Used the Alt+Left arrow key sequence in an attempt to go back to where I was.

This worked OK to begin with: for the first five presses, I got back one page at a time, until I reached the point where I should have been at "Creating Talk:Greenway Halt railway station"; but instead, it displayed the Talk:Greenway Halt railway station that I had just saved. This in itself was OK, because the page now exists where previously it didn't. But when at that page, the next use of Alt+Left arrow should have taken me back to my watchlist, but instead, it redisplayed the same page. Repeated uses of any of the normal "back" methods - Alt+Left arrow, ← Backspace or the button - make no difference, it won't go back any further. But if I right-click that button, I can pick my watchlist from the menu yielded: it's the next entry down from where I am. It's like the browsing history for the tab has been modified, so that the entry which had been http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Greenway_Halt_railway_station&action=edit&redlink=1 had been altered to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Greenway_Halt_railway_station and its referer had somehow been corrupted to the same page. So when attempting to go back, the browser (Firefox 32.0.1) sends me forwards again. This might be something for Matma Rex. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:44, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't think this has anything to do with the MediaWiki redirect, but just with the fact that action=edit&redlink=1 will issue a HTTP redirect to the view action. Can you try this with a non-redirect page? Matma Rex talk 16:28, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor available on Internet Explorer 11

Hi all, I'm writing to inform you that VisualEditor will become available to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 during today's regular software update. Support for some earlier versions of Internet Explorer is being worked on. If you encounter problems with VisualEditor on Internet Explorer, please contact the Editing team by leaving a message at the VE feedback page. Happy editing, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:39, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

PS. You can subscribe to the monthly newsletter to receive further news about VisualEditor.

"subst:"-style function for classes?

{{subst:}}ing a template makes it possible to see what it adds to and/or how it affects a page; is there something similar for a class? (For example, though it seems to have no effect – probably because the context isn't a table – what is "mergedtoprow" trying to do here: <div class="mergedtoprow">Just some plain text.</div>?) Sardanaphalus (talk) 12:55, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Most modern browsers provide the means to examine not just the HTML source of the page, but also see what styling affects the individual elements, even the CSS rules that are associated with various classes. I find that for mergedtoprow and the associated classes mergedrow and mergedbottomrow there are five rules:

.infobox.bordered .mergedtoprow td,
.infobox.bordered .mergedtoprow th {
  border:0;
  border-top:1px solid #aaa;
  border-right:1px solid #aaa;
}
.infobox.bordered .mergedrow td,
.infobox.bordered .mergedrow th {
  border:0;
  border-right:1px solid #aaa;
}
.infobox.geography .mergedtoprow td,
.infobox.geography .mergedtoprow th {
  border-top:1px solid #aaa;
  padding:0.4em 0.6em 0.2em 0.6em;
}
.infobox.geography .mergedrow td,
.infobox.geography .mergedrow th {
  border:0;
  padding:0 0.6em 0.2em 0.6em;
}
.infobox.geography .mergedbottomrow td,
.infobox.geography .mergedbottomrow th {
  border-top:0;
  border-bottom:1px solid #aaa;
  padding:0 0.6em 0.4em 0.6em;
}

so I would say that they hide the borders between rows in a table, and adjust the padding too - probably to bring rows closer together. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:53, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

In short, though, you're saying I should/could/might be able to see what effect a class is having / trying to have by e.g. saving something like <div class="[classname]">[Some pertinent test material]</div> on a sandbox page, then examining that page using e.g. (here on Palemoon/Firefox) Tools > Web Developer > Page Source...? Sardanaphalus (talk) 20:06, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

No, that won't work, because these particular CSS rules are not applicable to a <div>...</div>, no matter what classes you give it (unless it contains something that does match the selectors of those rules).

Each of the five rules that I gave above has two selectors, and each selector has three classes (these are the tokens beginning with a full stop) and an element (no full stop). Five of the selectors specify the td element, and five specify th so at the minimum they are specific to the <td>...</td> and <th>...</th> elements - no others. The presence of classes in those selectors means that the td/th elements must be nested inside elements that bear those classes. The first selector is .infobox.bordered .mergedtoprow td so this is specific to a <td>...</td> nested inside any element that has class="mergedtoprow" (probably, but not necessarily, a <tr>...</tr>), which is itself nested inside any element that has class="infobox bordered" (probably, but not necessarily, a <table>...</table>)

But rather than trying to mock something up, it's far easier to go to the article where you found the class - I used Didcot - and examine that page using the browser's tools. In Firefox 32, right-click on the word "Didcot" at the top of the infobox, and select "Inspect element". This splits the screen into three panes; the upper pane is the page you're inspecting; the lower left is equivalent to the page source; and the lower right shows what styling is being applied to the element that is highlighted lower left. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:16, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

That's very useful. Thank you. Sardanaphalus (talk) 08:43, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Blocked user logging in through OAuth causing an autoblock

Good morning. User:Natuur12 blocked someone on Commons as a sockpuppet; because this user uploaded something through OAuth, it caused an autoblock of Tool Labs, which shut down my and other people's bots. More information here: commons:Special:BlockList [29].

This really should not happen. How can we fix the software to ignore OAuth IPs? Magog the Ogre (t • c) 11:26, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

This happened once before with Sven Manguard blocking a user on commons which auto blocked the wmflabs..advice would be to whitelist the wmflabs IPs..not sure if thats possible though...--Ste moc 12:37, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

See MediaWiki:Autoblock whitelist. If you're talking about the commons, that would be commons:MediaWiki:Autoblock whitelist. And this needs to be done by a user who can edit the interface pages on the appropriate wiki. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:15, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Not again, I thought that the IP was whitelisted so that situations like this would not occur. Thanks for unblocking Magog! Natuur12 (talk) 14:04, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

@Od Mishehu: I will get this when I get home tonight. Is it safe to whitelist the entire 10.0.0.0/8 subdomain? Magog the Ogre (t • c) 14:20, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

This is beyond the scope of what I can handle. However, it looks like it might. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:38, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

See my comment on bugzilla. --Steinsplitter (talk) 16:41, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Done Added 10.0.0.0/8 to enwiki whitelist for now. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:37, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Trying to get a template to work

Template:Wiktes I just made this template to create interwiki links to Wiktionary definitions of Spanish-language terms. It works just fine in its current form, except if the term has some styling to it. E.g.: {{wiktes|si}} links to wikt:si#Spanish and displays as "si". But if I were to try to use {{wiktes|s'''i'''}} then that would link to wikt:si#Spanish and display as something else. Can someone please assist? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:48, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Now you can type like this: {{wiktes|si|s'''i'''}} → si. Oh, yes, the old format also works: {{wiktes|si}} → si. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:06, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It fails because you're trying to get one parameter to do two jobs - provide a link and format some text. At the core of your template is [[wikt:{{{1}}}#Spanish|{{{1}}}]] so if you feed this with s'''i''', what you end up with is [[wikt:s'''i'''#Spanish|s'''i''']] which fails for exactly the same reason that [[s'''i''']] → si fails - the triple apostrophes are being taken as a literal part of the page name. A construct like [[wikt:{{{1}}}#Spanish|{{{2}}}]] would separate link from markup, but relies on two parameters being passed, so I would extend this to [[wikt:{{{1}}}#Spanish|{{{2|{{{1}}}}}}]] at the very minimum, but less prone to error is [[wikt:{{{1}}}#Spanish|{{#if:{{{2|}}} |{{{2}}}|{{{1}}} }}]] Then you would use the template as {{wiktes|si|s'''i'''}} --Redrose64 (talk) 08:09, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

@Edgars2007: Thanks so much! @Redrose64: If you want to peek through the history of the template, you'll see how I had a lot of configurations pretty close to that but never quite. Thanks a lot! —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:05, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

External links/off-wiki URLs

Is it me, or do these show in a slightly different colour if you've visited those pages? I first noticed it at work today, but I thought it was something our side with the network and IE, but the same is happening at home with Firefox. Has something been changed behind the scenes? Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 18:03, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

This has always been like this (if you haven't changed your settings). See Help:Link_color. For all webpages, you can change it by changing your browser's settings. If it's for Wikipedia only, you can modify your user-specfic CSS. --Glaisher (talk) 18:14, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Never noticed the difference before today! Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 18:18, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

No, the colour for visited external links in the MonoBook skin has definitely changed in the last day or two - they are now purple; they used to be blue. The unvisited link colour seems to have changed too, but I can't be sure. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:46, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Ahhh, glad it's not me! Yes, every link (if I visited them or not) was the light blue colour, now the visited ones are purple. Anyone else with any info? Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 16:46, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Any more info? Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead}

Black Screen

When I click on a picture in Wikipedia, instead of an enlargement of the picture, which is what I used to get, I get a black screen. The gray at the top and bottom are still there but the whole middle of the screen is just a solid black. This happens with all pictures in Wikipedia but not in other websites. I have researched this and have not found anyone else to have had this problem. It just stated about a week ago. I am using Windows XP and Internet Explorer 8. I tried waiting but the enlargement never came. If I then click on refresh I go back to the original page.172.6.249.33 (talk) 09:22, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

See related bug reports in the bugtracker. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:32, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Dear AKlapper, Thank you for replying. I went to the site you suggested and looked into several of the offerings and some were quite close to what I have experienced but the solutions were far above my understanding. Instead I have found that by right clicking on the image and clicking "Open File" I get the enlarged picture, so I'll simply go that route in the future. Thank you again.172.6.249.33 (talk) 17:44, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

The relevant bug is bugzilla:70553 and the fix will be deployed tomorrow.--Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 06:34, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

[How many WMFers does it take to put a welcome template on an IP's talk page? Drmies (talk) 01:26, 20 September 2014 (UTC)]

Standard search for exactly "wikipedia:" results in back-end error

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T68259

If this weren't trivial and probably unimportant, I suppose it should go to bugzilla, but... If one enters into the standard search box... wikipedia: (including the colon), one gets only (in red font):

   An error has occurred while searching: The search backend returned an error:

So you wonder why I tried this. Just a silly way to try to list all such meta-pages. I'm sure there are much simpler and more sensible ways. A possibly slightly more significant issue that follows from this is that there seems to be no way to search bugzilla for exactly "wikipedia:", as the colon is ignored.Layzeeboi (talk) 00:30, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

@Layzeeboi: I'm not able to reproduce this. If I search wikipedia: (link), I get a list of results for wikipedia with no errors. Chrome on Ubuntu.—LucasThoms 02:46, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

This happens in other cases too. One that I remember is | (vertical bar). Another is "ideographic space" (space character used in languages like Japanese). 86.179.114.32 (talk) 02:48, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

If the intention is to find all pages whose names begin "wikipedia:", which I interpret to mean all the pages in the Wikipedia: namespace, there's a far more efficient (and much less error-prone) method. In the sidebar, click on Special pages, and under "Lists of pages", click All pages with prefix. Leave the first box blank, and from the drop-down, select "Wikipedia", then click Go, and you get this list. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:29, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

It's likely already in Bugzilla, filed about the old search that will get replaced soon anyway. Beta features allows using the new search already. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 08:15, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

I get exactly the same result using Iceweasel. Enabled New Search in Beta, no problem. (Other than ignoring my namespace specification.) ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:39, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Added the bug I filed on this a while ago. Protonk (talk) 13:21, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

A template mystery regarding geotags on Commons

Look at this file

,

work through to Commons, click on see this file on Google Maps and it links immediately- but there are no Commons roundels on the map to indicate the location of other photos in this village. Same on OpenStreetMap This was taken during a Wiki loves monuments in 2012- and uses (object location) in the description . I have checked the geotag on source code and it is broadly correct- so the issue is why isn't it displaying? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ClemRutter (talk • contribs) 10:16, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Search index is not being updated (still)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T68011

My previous report on this was turned into a discussion about CirrusSearch, which is not yet ready for production. This let-them-eat-cake approach was not helpful in the 18th century, and it is not helpful in 2014. One June 3 the official response to the indexing failure was that there was no way to get it started again, yet it did get running, and it ran until September 11. Who is looking into the failure of the indexing for Lucene-search? Chris the speller ^yack 17:14, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

You are, apparently. Do you see anything interesting? --Nemo 11:11, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

If that edit was intended to be helpful, I don't understand what you are asking. Chris the speller ^yack 14:25, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Nobody is looking into the failure (that's why the ticket is marked as WONTFIX) as CirrusSearch will replace Lucene soon, and CirrusSearch is pretty ready for production. --Malyacko (talk) 19:55, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

In that case we ought to add a message to the search results page indicating that it's essentially meaningless, and provide a link to Google or Bing instead. Pburka (talk) 16:28, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Browser loops on "Connecting to en.wikipedia.org..."

About two weeks ago I noticed that my browser (Iceweasel) occasionally going into a loop of "Connecting to en.wikipedia.org..." At first I thought it was perhaps a mouse or keyboard problem, or maybe (but how?) a browser problem. But there seem to be Wikipedia/Wikimedia specific aspects.

The problem occurs when I go to any section heading, or to non-section anchors. The browser gets there, but then instead settling in a "Done" state it starts looping through the transferring/connecting states, with an occasional "Stopped". "Recent pages" shows multiple hits to the section, even though I have clicked on it just once. Back arrowing returns to the top of the page and a "Done" state. Manually entering the url for a section leads to the same problem. Going to internal anchors (not section headers) has the same problem. URLs containing a "#" seems to be a common element.

This occurs across all name spaces, though it doesn't happen on my own Talk page. The same problem happens on Commons, and de.wikipedia.org, but not on conservapedia.com. Any thoughts? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:47, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi, what browser and operating system do you use? Legoktm (talk) 01:03, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

@Legoktm: I guess you didn't see it, do I'll point out that J. Johnson's browser is evidently Iceweasel (says near the beginning), which I have not heard of. Dustin (talk) 01:18, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Oops, missed that. So OS is debian then. Legoktm (talk) 01:36, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, Iceweasel (3.0.6) being Debian's variant of Firefox. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:46, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Error

Hi, from today I am getting this error continuously at Wikipedia at every article and page. I have to refresh a page many times for it to load properly. Can anyone help me with this. The error is listed below.

Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.

Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.

(Cannot contact the database server: Too many connections (10.64.48.14))

You can try searching via Google in the meantime. Note that their indexes of our content may be out of date.

If anyone can help me in this matter, I will be really grateful. Thanks in advance--Jockzain (talk) 14:01, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Can't help you, but can confirm that I get it as well, and also quite often. Fram (talk) 14:06, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

For about two hours from 12:50 (UTC), I was only able to make two edits due to being served the above error on several page loads. It seems that the job queue became overloaded with edits to high-use templates. It's been behaving for me since about 14:50 (UTC), and should be OK now for all users. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:06, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for replying, I thought it was happening only with me. It is working fine now.--Jockzain (talk) 20:52, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Network issue

There's a network issue affecting Wikimedia's San Francisco data center, which serves several pacific rim countries. Users in geographical regions served by this data center may see intermittent connectivity issues. Wikimedia's technical operations team is analyzing the issue. --Ori.livneh (talk) 07:26, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Change to redirect page interface?

I have never posted here (or in any other Wikipedia forum) before, so please forgive me if this is out of place. (If it is out of place, could you please point me in the proper direction?) I noticed that the interface of redirect pages (the pages themselves, not their automatic redirect functionality) seemed to change today (yesterday now, I guess), during the day, while I was using the site. I'm hoping someone can confirm this and tell me I'm not crazy.

This applies to every redirect page I have seen since early/mid-afternoon my time (Pacific Daylight Time) on Thursday, Sept. 18, but I'm going to use United States of America (which redirects to United States) as an example.

On the redirect page at "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_States_of_America&redirect=no", the title of the redirect page itself ("United States of America") is in the upper-left corner, and the title of the target page ("United States") is directly below it, to the right of the arrow. The title of the target page is linked, and until today, the link always used the standard form "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States". The link now seems to use the form "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_States&redirect=no".

After noticing this on one page, I began specifically paying attention to it, and every redirect page I have come across since that time seems to be using the latter form. To see if it made any difference, I experimented using three different computers, running three different versions of Windows and using three different browsers, and I checked each configuration while logged in and while logged out. None of that made any difference.

In searching for an explanation, I discovered (assuming I'm interpreting the information on these pages correctly) that a new version/build of the MediaWiki software was deployed on Thursday, Sept. 18, between 18:00 & 20:00 UTC, or between 11:00 & 13:00 PDT. That meshes perfectly with when I first noticed the change (around that time or shortly thereafter).

The details of the software update are at mw:MediaWiki 1.24/wmf21.
The general rollout schedule is at mw:MediaWiki 1.24/Roadmap.
The confirmation of when it actually got rolled out is at wikitech:Deployments#Thursday.2C.C2.A0September.C2.A018.

I do realize that it's the exact same page either way, but why the change? Was this an intentional change? (In searching for an explanation, I never found anything mentioning it at all, and I assume that all intentional changes must be documented somewhere.) It seems to me that there would be very little use (or no use at all) for this on Wikipedia, since "&redirect=no" is only needed for redirect pages, and as long as bots are catching all double redirects, then the target page will NEVER itself be a redirect page (thus there would never be a need for this change). Anyway, does anyone else see this, or am I crazy? If I'm not crazy, does anyone have any thoughts about this? (If you've read this far, you probably know much more about this stuff than I do.) Jdaloner (talk) 11:44, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

I'd guess that while the addition of the "redirect=no" argument has little effect here, it would be very helpful on wikis that have a value of $wgMaxRedirects that's greater than 1. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 15:17, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

I realize it may have more effect on other wikis, and that would provide a possible reason for deciding to make this change. But I'd really like to find/get a definitive answer as to whether this change was an unintended consequence of some other change that was implemented (i.e., whether this is a bug) or whether this change was intentional. Don't all intentional changes get documented somewhere? (If so, does anyone know where?) If this sort of information is not posted anywhere, is there a method/venue for reaching the people who actually work on the software and would know [whether this was intentional or not] for sure? Jdaloner (talk) 00:11, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I can personally guarantee that that feature is much older than a day. Redirect links without the "&redirect=no" part will automatically go to the target, while those with that part allow you to view the actual redirect itself plus any redirect tags. Dustin (talk) 00:35, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

@Dustin V. S.: The &redirect=no feature has been available for years, yes; the point is that it wasn't part of the outward link on a redirect page until very recently. Consider a redirect to today's Featured Article - GNoSR. Until recently this displayed as

Great North of Scotland Railway

but it presently displays as

Great North of Scotland Railway

The redirect=no parameter has been added to this link in the last few days, it wasn't there before. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:17, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

It appears to be a side effect of gerrit:158627: the old code had to handle the last link in the chain specially, while the new code lists them out semantically. MatmaRex may be able to give more insight. IMO the addition of redirect=no to the final page in the redirect chain is neutral if not good, since it doesn't hurt most cases and improves things if you come across a double redirect. Anomie ⚔ 11:21, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I think this feature is nice, especially when its a redirect which redirect to itself - it can be really confusing when comparing titles which has lot of áé etc. But if you type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNoSR in the adress it change it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_North_of_Scotland_Railway which is new too. Christian75 (talk) 14:50, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

That's been happening for a few weeks, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 130#URL changes when I am on a redirect and threads linked from that. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:45, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I've noticed this too. Every redirect I create has the redirect=no parameter. Is there a way to stop this from happening? Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 12:28, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

One thing which is good is that now Page views will include redirects too. --Fauzan^{✆ talk}_{✉ mail} 18:57, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by article count

Is there a super geek among you hallowed nerds who can "fix" Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by article count? And by "fix" I mean "update"--hasn't been done since June, it seems. I need to see if I can catch a glimpse of this Dr. Blofeld character with my super-strong binoculars, and I want to know if this scary Wizardman is breathing down my neck. Thanks in advance. Drmies (talk) 16:55, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

@Drmies: This is one of many reports that had been built by BernsteinBot (talk · contribs) from Toolserver data. There is already a thread about it at User talk:MZMcBride#Bot update wikipedians by articles. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:11, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

I know--there's more than one. I'm forumshopping in hopes of someone lightening the load of poor old MCMcBride. Drmies (talk) 19:14, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

@Hedonil: how hard it would be to make such page at XTools? Something similar to adminstats? I suppose there are not quite big difference between these two (from the technical point). Ok, if the full table would be way too big, then maybe for top X users. And what about Wikipedians by edit count (at least for my Wikipedia, where we have voting for the best Wikipedian of the year, with this tool we would know who we need to include :) ). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:26, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

@Drmies: If you want to compare yourself against specific individuals, the last time that I did a count for Blowers, it stood at 95,563. About 100 times as many as you. Current counts are in the little table (row "Article", column "Pages") to the left of the red pie chart in these links: Drmies; Dr. Blofeld; Wizardman. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:03, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

@Drmies: - I haven't written anything in quite a few months (been working on expanding one-sentence junk instead), so I'm sure you've gotten pretty far ahead of me by now. Wizardman 21:25, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Redrose, I 'preciate it, but I want a full list--I'm taking all of them on. If I had no hope of catching the evil doctor I'd simply block his ass. (That's right Ernst: I'm talking to you.) Wizardman, you took the bait--it was I who wrote those stubs and flavored your drinking water with the desire to expand rather than create, so bwuhahaha. Anyway, thanks. I'll wait for gods to come by and miraculously fix this. Or learn Latvian. Drmies (talk) 22:57, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

There must be a way of updating this list, the similar list for edit count and the very important project at WP:LIVINGDEAD since the demise of Toolserver. Eggheads - great cracking! Chuckle. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 12:30, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Interesting, Lugnuts. The first (random) one on that list turned out to be dead on en-wiki already. Thanks. Yes, eggheads. I mean, Writ Keeper and his ilk. Drmies (talk) 02:14, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Speaking of interesting, I've spotted that the list by edits is being updated daily! Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 09:48, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Reloading redirects

If you use a redirect, and then you click a TOC link, the page now does a second reload. This is relatively new behavior. For example, I ust got here via WP:VPT and every time i click on a TOC it has to reload the page to the un-redirected page before jumping to the TOC link. This is somewhat annoying and I wonder if it's intentional, and if so, why? It can't be good for the server or the user to reload the page a second time for no real reason. hbdragon88 (talk) 01:49, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not getting this, but perhaps #Change to redirect page interface? is related. Is there a "redirect=no" in the URL? --NE2 03:03, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

No, it's just the standard redirect, something like Grand theft auto 5 for instance. Go there, click on any TOC link, it'll reload and "correct" itself to Grand Theft Auto V and then it'll jump to the section. I guess I should say that I'm using Opera 12 on a Win7 machine with SSL enabled, but I've had SSL enabled for a long time and it doesn't do that for just jumping between headers on the same page. hbdragon88 (talk) 03:13, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

@NE2: More likely Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 129#Redirects to sections. Anomie ⚔ 11:30, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Can't reproduce on Firefox 32 or Chromium 35. I don't have Opera handy to test. Anomie ⚔ 11:30, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

When I typed in the search bar "WP:VPT", Opera 12.16 "converted" it automatically to Wikipedia:Village pump in the URL (without any other my actions). I'm using Win8. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 06:30, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

What you've described in Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 129#Redirects to sections. The question here is what happens if you click on one of the TOC links after doing that: did it jump to the section (expected behavior) or did it (re-)load the redirect target page and then go to the section (what hbdragon88 described)? Anomie ⚔ 10:57, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Ok, it seems I have misunderstood hbdragon88's problem :) No, it didn't reload, it gone to right section. If it matters, I have no problems with it also in WinXP. Tested for both Monobook and Vector. Maybe Win7 problem? :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:37, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

How to style infoboxes in LESS which replaced CSS as of 1.22?

How to style infoboxes in 1.23 using LESS instead of CSS? Prior to 1.22, CSS styling was straightforward, you'd just add it to main.css or common.css. Tried converting LESS to CSS using online converters but they get stuck trying to resolve external links found in LESS. 192.121.112.173 (talk) 14:08, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

LESS didn't replace CSS. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:33, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Why does it appear that some special pages only work in mobile view?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T66939

For example, Special:History (which I expected could be used in a way like "Special:History/Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)" to link to the page's history) says "This page is not available on desktop. Please click the mobile view link at the bottom of the page." I most certainly am not going to use mobile view on my desktop computer! Dustin (talk) 14:49, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

On my desktop, if I click the Mobile link, it says: "No such page". Is it Bugzilla time? Robert McClenon (talk) 15:10, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, the page existed at some point; just stick "Special:Histo" into the search bar (without pressing search or the enter key), and "Special:History" will come up, proving that there is something there. Dustin (talk) 15:14, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

bugzilla:64939 is already open. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:15, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-39

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

Recent software changes

You can test a new Beta Feature called HHVM. It should make editing faster. Please report bugs if you see them. [30]

Problems

There was a problem on the English Wikipedia on September 19. It was due to edits on a template used on many pages.
Sites were down for users in the Pacific area around 7:00 UTC on September 20. It was due to a problem in the San Francisco data center.
There were two bad bugs messing up articles in some browsers in VisualEditor. We fixed the bugs and updated the sites. [31] [32]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf22) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 23, and on all Wikipedias on September 25 (calendar).
If you have more than 2000 notifications, the oldest ones will be removed.[33] [34]
In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender. [35] [36]
The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing. [37]
The "Cancel" button of the VisualEditor save window is now called "Resume editing". This shows that you can still edit and you won't lose your changes. [38]
There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for code and Ctrl+Shift+5 for ~~strikethrough~~. [39] [40]
In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening. [41]

Future site changes

You can see a plan for the move to Phabricator. It's the new tool to track bugs. A guided tour will be done via video on September 24. [42]

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

09:05, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

"View and edit watchlist" error

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T73109

Since today (perhaps earlier, not a feature I use often), if I click "View and edit watchlist", I get the following error:

Invalid value was provided for loading flow content.

Return to Main Page. [0698e7ae] 2014-09-21 21:36:58: Fatal exception of type Flow\Exception\InvalidInputException

Anybody any idea what this means? I use the latest version of Firefox and Windows 7. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 21:40, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I've opened bugzilla:71109 about this. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:41, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm kind of baffled that this seems to be Flow related, because the only Flow-related page that I have on my watchlist is WP:FLOW and not any page that actually uses Flow... --Randykitty (talk) 11:57, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

@Randykitty: This sounds like another variant of the problems at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 130#dead-end message. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:58, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Pronunciation things shifted in infobox

Can someone explain why in {{Infobox aluminium}} the pronunciation row looks shifted vertically, while neighbour magnesium has nothing of this? (does it have to do with the sound link?). -DePiep (talk) 23:23, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

At first glance, it looks like the icon may be the cause. -- Gadget850^talk 19:00, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah. And maybe it is not an issue at all. Consider closed. -DePiep (talk) 21:26, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Indents

Colons are used to indent comments on Talk pages (one for one indent, two for two indents, etc), but it can somethimes be quite difficult to distinguish how many there are in a row (unless large font size is used). I am sure this is why indents are often so erratic, which can sometimes make following the sequence of comments on a page quite difficult, especially if users start using bullet points as well. Could the software perhaps be altered using a clearer key combination such as the + plus sign, to enable users to see clearly the number of indents they make before adding their comments? --P123ct1 (talk) 10:35, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

":::::" and "+++++" are equally easy to count for me in the edit box (but not on the rendered page). Does your browser not display the edit box with a monospace font? What is the browser and have you changed its monospace setting from the default (Courier New in my Firefox)? If there are many colons and I don't bother counting then I sometimes use copy-paste to get the same number. There are millions of pages in MediaWiki wikis already using colon so plus would have to be an alternative and not a replacement, but I don't support the confusion of having two notations. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:52, 22 September 2014 (UTC

I have changed the edit area font style in "Preferences" to monospaced font and it works fine now, I can see the number of colons perfectly. Don't know why I didn't think of experimenting there before. Brain not working today. --P123ct1 (talk) 21:21, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Don't count them—copy them and add another. Using Firefox, you can click at the beginning of the line, press Ctrl+Shift+Right then Ctrl+Shift+Left then Ctrl+C to copy the leading colons. Johnuniq (talk) 23:05, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Help with userscript

Hi, can someone take a look at this edit? It seems to have broken PleaseStand's userinfo.js script, but I can't figure out why. Thanks in advance! --Waldir ^talk 13:38, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

At a glance, groupPages(s) should be groupPages[s], as it is an array, rather than a function. --Splarka (rant) 07:31, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Splarka :) yes, indeed you're right, I missed that one. However, Ruslik0 did that tweak but then reverted his edits; I initially thought he had experimented but it still didn't work, and I didn't want to rush to comment here before he did with his findings, but now I'm thinking he might have indeed fixed it / showed me how to fix it, but reverted the edits as he didn't want to perform that change himself? I'll give it a try with the array notation and report back. --Waldir ^talk 10:22, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

As I suspected, that fix wasn't enough to make it work (I assume Ruslik0 just didn't want to bother with exhaustive testing to properly fix the script, with is understandable). I did some more testing on a clone of that script, and finally found the culprit: groupPages had to be initialized as an object. Now it works — thanks both for taking a look :) --Waldir ^talk 11:13, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Template error

I noticed that Template:uw-test1 is failing to substitute user names:

Hello, I'm Tryptofish. An edit that you recently made seemed to be a test and has been removed. If you want more practice editing, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks!

It would be helpful if someone who understands how to fix it could fix it, and check if other uw templates have the same problem. Thanks! --Tryptofish (talk) 17:20, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

It works fine. The problem is your edit [43] didn't add subst: as required in the documentation at Template:Uw-test1. subst: is how you request substitution. A bot has since fixed your error so the above post now looks correct. If you are using some tool to add the template and the tool doesn't subst it then say which tool. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:51, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Woops! I can't believe I made that mistake! I do these templates all the time, and I guess I just had a mental lapse. Sorry to bother you, and thank you very much for the answer. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:39, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

References showing on discussion pages

Hi, has there been a change recently that is causing reference lists to appear at the bottom of discussion pages? I don't recall seeing this before. (See Talk:Downton_Abbey for an example.) This behaviour is usually unwanted, I would suggest. Is there any way to turn it off? 86.190.237.83 (talk) 00:41, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

What would you like to happen instead? If you don't want reference lists on talk pages, then don't use ref tags on talk pages. Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:47, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

The tags are normally only there by accident because people copy pieces of the article. If you want a reference list to appear then you can add the appropriate directive, just as happens in articles ("reflist" or whatever it is). I have never seen that done on a discussion page because normally no one ever wants it, at least not at the very end of the page after some unrelated thread. The point is that now the references seem to be appearing automatically, without any directive, and with seemingly no way to suppress them. They sit there, relating to dead threads, confusing the end of the discussion page. 86.190.237.83 (talk) 00:58, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I fixed it so the references appear with the correct section by adding {{reflist-talk}} to the appropriate section. GB fan 01:05, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

See Automatically generated reference lists. -- Gadget850^talk 01:15, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the link; that explains all! 86.190.237.83 (talk) 02:13, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Oh, and I forgot to say, thanks also GB fan for fixing it on that page. 86.190.237.83 (talk) 02:56, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Search error

Not sure whether this is related to the bugs filed above...

At the search page (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch), when I search for reference or references I get "An error has occurred while searching: The search backend returned an error:".

Actually, this is a reasonable thing to want to do, because I wanted to search the Help pages for that topic. 86.190.237.83 (talk) 02:36, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

The problem does not happen with the new search that you can switch on under "Beta Features" in your preferences. The new search (Cirrus) will soon replace the current search (Lucene). --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:19, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

"Sorry, the servers are overloaded at the moment."

Anyone know why I'm getting a "Sorry, the servers are overloaded at the moment." moment on today's AFD log? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 16:15, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Is that the standard "too many people are trying to view this page" MediaWiki message (which is common to see at AfD) or an HTTP 503 error? I got one of the latter today. BethNaught (talk) 16:26, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

The former. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 16:31, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

At the moment there are ONE HUNDRED SIXTY SEVEN AfDs on today's log. That's the biggest number I can remember. There's been some discussion about whether we need to make technical and/or procedural changes in light of the increasing load at AfD. See e.g. Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion#Daily AfD pages are getting too long. In the meantime I assume that the increased frequency of overloaded server messages is partly a result. --Arxiloxos (talk) 17:02, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Experimental Graphs extension for maps & charts is on at meta & mediawiki.org

Not sure if the right place for this announcement - Graph extension has been enabled on meta & mediawiki.org. See it in action and comment here. --Yurik (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Search index is not being updated

A simple check is to search for ~2014, which will show that the index saw its last update on 11 September, though the article has been edited several times a day since then. Before suggesting a Bugzilla report to get this fixed, notice that this bug officially says they won't (can't?) fix it. We need to do something about this. Chris the speller ^yack 13:55, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

@Chris the speller: You can join the sixteen thousand users who are using the new search engine already, just enable the beta feature: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. According to mw:Search#Timeline en.wp is one of the only six wikis where it's not enabled for everyone yet, and judging by the pace of deployments so far this might happen within a month or so. Matma Rex talk 15:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I have been using the new search engine (CirrusSearch) for many, many months; the 15,999 users have joined me. It's not ready for prime time; it can't find hyphens, which is important in many cases, such as finding and fixing "he was assigned to follow-up on the discovery". I reported this problem over three months ago, and have seen no progress on it. BTW, the right way to get to the Timeline is mw:Search/Timeline, not the link you offered. (OK, now your link works – it must have been a hiccup.) I am not here to complain about any personal inability to use WP. I am pointing out that the general public is losing out because of this situation. Category:Nebula Award for Best Novel-winning works has had to be jury-rigged to provide an alternate search for the intersection of two categories after a category move that the old search engine will never figure out unless the index gets updated. The new search engine is not ready to take the place of lucene-search, whose index badly needs to be updated. Chris the speller ^yack 17:29, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Could you link to your report from over three months ago? Thanks! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 09:08, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

@AKlapper (WMF): Sure. [44] and, after all the topics load, it's the bottom (oldest) topic that is not hidden ("Can't find hyphenated forms"). Chris the speller ^yack 16:40, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like a feature request (mw:How to report a bug) for the new search to somehow support explicitly searching for terms with such dashes. New search algorithm's tokenization ignoring the dash in "follow-up" is likely a very welcome feature to most users searching for terms, and not welcome to those few editors that want to fix such typos. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 08:31, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Bug 70950 has been submitted. Your assumed "very welcome feature" is not a big deal; Lucene-search already covers this by finding both hyphenated and unhyphenated forms if a reader searches for the unhyphenated form. It provides some control over the results, while CirrusSearch does not. Chris the speller ^yack 18:55, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Some Haaretz URLs included the word hasite, e.g. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE.jhtml?itemNo=871998&contrassID=2&subContrassID=8&sbSubContrassID=0 and most of these articles have new style URLs — in this example http://www.haaretz.co.il/sport/1.1418710. To find articles for editing to update the URLs, search for hasite, which now reports 128 results. But search results are now almost six days out of date. Of the results:

List of 2007–08 Israeli football transfers fixed 04:09, 16 September 2014
Jerusalem Light Rail fixed 13:19, 16 September 2014‎
Illegal immigration from Africa to Israel fixed 20:29, 16 September 2014
Arad, Israel fixed 17:27, 17 September 2014‎
Cherbourg Project fixed 06:30, 17 September 2014‎
Gideon Levy fixed 15:52, 18 September 2014‎

However, articles edited before these are correctly not found in this search:

Zeev Sternhell fixed 13:43, 12 September 2014

I have been editing these articles for over a month and they usually disappear from the search a day or two after I fix them, but now the search is six days behind.

As a separate matter, it would be nice if there were a utility for updating URLs when a website returns a URL different from the one supplied to it. —Anomalocaris (talk) 02:49, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: completely orthogonal to the discussion about search, i want to mention that when searching for links of specific form, it's probably better to use Special:LinkSearch. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 03:24, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

קיפודנחש (aka kipod): Thanks. I find regular search to be easier to use for various reasons including the ability to search within the article space and avoid all the user and talk page links. It's still not updated after more than 7 days. —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:52, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

OK, it finally updated and the above articles are no longer found, but it took 8 days. —Anomalocaris (talk) 15:06, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Problems logging in

Hope this is the right place to discuss this. I have been a very active editor on WP since 2007, and have never had problems logging in, until a couple of weeks ago. I was using Safari, and had to make a new password in order to log in every single time I arrived at Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons. This would happen many times a day. I changed to using Firefox, hoping that would solve the problem. Using Firefox I am somewhat better but I still get the problem, just not quite as often. It does not seem to be a cookie problem as my cookies on other sites are working fine. Any ideas? Many thanks, Invertzoo (talk) 20:36, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Invertzoo, are you having to change your password every time (not just type it in again)? That sounds horrible.

Let me see whose attention I can get for you. (My guess is that the answer will involve speculation about a corrupted cookie or something else that can only be solved by WP:BYPASSing your cache.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:37, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I am having to change my password every time I open a new window. Crazy, right? Invertzoo (talk) 21:53, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Invertzoo, can you clarify, are you being logged out, and you are asked to change your password when you log back in? Or are you suddenly presented with the password change page while still logged in? Also, on the password change form, is there a cancel button (we have different versions of the form for different scenarios)? CSteipp (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I get loggged out extremely often (more often on Safari than on Firefox) and when I try to log in, whatever my current password is, is not acceptable, so I have to hit "forgot my password", get a new temporary one via email, and then use that to be able to create a new password, which also only lasts perhaps a day at maximum despite hitting the button that says "remember me for 30 days". I don't recall seeing a "cancel" button, although there may have been one which I did not notice. I can check that the next time it happens. Invertzoo (talk) 01:55, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

The password change form has a cancel button on the Commons form I am presented with (I am sure about that) and on the WP form too (I think, but am not 100% sure). Thanks for any help you can give me. Invertzoo (talk) 13:48, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, that's totally crazy. I'm curios: What happens if you click 'Cancel'?

CSteipp (WMF), is there anything she can do to get past this? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:45, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

When I clicked "Cancel", I was back where I started, nothing helpful happens. Yesterday was a little bit better with this problem, but that was partly because I am now trying to keep just one Wikipedia and one Wikimedia Commons window open all day long, so it doesn't happen so often. However if I open another window it is again the same situation. Invertzoo (talk) 12:51, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

I should clarify that this problem happens every single time I open a new window in Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons. The default is that I am logged out, even if I am successfully logged in on another window at the same time. And every time I have to log in, I always have to create a new password as the old one is not accepted even though I created and used it successfully an hour before when opening the first window. Invertzoo (talk) 13:04, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

It sounds like you may have privacy mode enabled. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:16, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

I think that "privacy mode" should only be making her login again, not requiring her to reset her password. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:30, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Having to reset the password very frequently is what is most time-consuming and frustrating. Using Firefox I am doing a little better than I was with Safari, but still the problem persists at an annoying level. In the last day or two I have had more luck staying logged-on to Wikipedia compared to staying logged-on to Wikimedia Commons. If I get onto Wikipedia and am careful to keep one window open all day long, I can usually get on OK without having to get a new password more than once a day. With Wikimedia Commons that is not true; if I am gone for several hours, even though I left one window open, I have to get a new password if I want to open another window. Can anyone ask about this problem anywhere else where someone might recognize what is happening? This problem is really slowing me down and holding me back from a lot of things I want to do. It's very discouraging. Invertzoo (talk) 23:52, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Invertzoo, since Chris is out for a while I've filed this as bug 71148 and asked people who'd know how to fix it to take a look. I'd take a look myself but its in code I'm not at all familiar with. I will continue bothering people who know how to fix it though. It might be useful to add yourself to the bug and add more comments there. The bug has a link to this page linked but (at least I've found that) pushing the conversation to bugzilla can speed up communication for this kind of thing. It also allows uploading screenshots and stuff which might be useful.NEverett (WMF) (talk) 22:20, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

@Invertzoo: What version of Safari and Firefox are you using? In order to fix it, we need to try to replicate the bug, and this will help. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:32, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

UPDATE: Let me explain one important thing I have just discovered: I almost always work on a desktop iMac (recently purchased), but just now I tried going to Wikipedia and Commons on my husband's MacBook Air. I seem to be able to do everything OK on that machine, so far at any rate, no problems with logging in or passwords right now. I will know better whether or not that is 100% true by the end of today, but it looks as if the problem is some sort of weird issue with the iMac. I am using Firefox 12.0 and Safari 7.1, thanks for asking. I guess perhaps we may have to drag the iMac down to the Apple store. Invertzoo (talk) 19:32, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Invertzoo, the current version of Firefox is 32, not twelve. Was that a typo? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:40, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Ah, yes, so sorry about that, Firefox is 32.0.2 , you are quite right! Also after running Apple's DiskUtility things seem to be better on the iMac. I will be more sure tomorrow when I use it more. Invertzoo (talk) 22:15, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

ANOTHER UPDATE - SOLVED. As far as I can tell everything is OK now. It seems that DiskUtility fixed the problem. Thanks everyone for your time and effort. It'e nice to get back to normal. :) Invertzoo (talk) 12:43, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Latex font

What font is the math markup using? SpinningSpark 01:48, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

looks like mathjax uses STIX Fonts project. Not sure what the non-mathjax latex uses. Protonk (talk) 02:42, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Mathjax is not rendering in the STIX fonts (tried in Windows 7 and XP, logged in and logged out, in a variety of browsers). It was the standard Latex I was mostly interested in. SpinningSpark 08:13, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps the question I should be asking is what is the fallback webfont? SpinningSpark 13:01, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Chrome (on os x) using MAthjax reports the fonts as STIX. Checking on the png fallback font. Protonk (talk) 20:10, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Looks like (from the Math extension) the big one is Latin Modern. HTH. Protonk (talk) 20:28, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, SpinningSpark 22:45, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

MathJax uses Computer Modern as its default font (as webfont and PNG fallback font), or STIX if you have the STIX fonts installed locally. Texvc (the default PNG renderer) uses Computer Modern only. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 20:51, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Tool idea

Hi. I'd like to (and I'm almost in the process on) write a tool which would show latest category members -- with subcats, recursively -- for new page patrol purposes. It would be a web app where you type a wiki name and category name and get a list of category members sorted by time. Later on I'd have to implement pages (if there's too many) or limit the time frame. Is this worth doing given that categories would move to Wikidata soon? If so, how soon? Thoughts? (P.S. Please distribute to sister projects village pumps). Gryllida (talk) 07:31, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

There is something similar. Ok, it is for latest changes, but you can hide something, that really is not a new page (like "Hide minor edits"). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:21, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

This is different, I'm referring to new page patrol specifically (and it would also have to go through categories recursively). Gryllida (talk) 01:02, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Categories moving to Wikidata? When and where was this announced? --Redrose64 (talk) 11:04, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I was told that Wikidata would complement it, not replace it, at the Commons village pump. Dunno details - if you find it please share. Just a thought I heard somewhere in the past and it'd impact plans of work on the tool I'm talking about. Gryllida (talk) 01:02, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

I've needed a tool like this for a long time. I wish it was built into MediaWiki, something like Related Changes but covers additions and removals from categories. Technically, I can use AWB to accomplish this now, where I produce a list of articles in a category structure at one point, then later produce another and do a list compare. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 10:51, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah. DPL doesn't scale because of the intersection stuff it has. I have a similar recursive challenge here, to fetch fresh subcats members. I could write mine as an extension, but I need to test it on a real db, and I'm too lazy to clone it on my computer. I'll read around about means to do that. (On a related note, if I limit the time frame, I think the task would be easier - I could only recurse into categories that were edited sufficiently recently.) Gryllida (talk) 06:06, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Below editing window

Below editing window there should be a space between "Editing help" and "(opens in new window)". --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:39, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I see the text without a space in the html source but the whole text is hidden for me on the rendered page, apparently due to MediaWiki talk:Edithelppage#Vanished? [45] [46]. I see the problem with the missing space on the rendered page when I preview Special:MyPage/common.css with this:

.editButtons .editHelp, .editButtons .mw-editButtons-pipe-separator {display: inline;}

The space is also missing when I test commons:Special:MyPage/common.css, but it's present at mw:Special:MyPage/common.css and testwiki:Special:MyPage/common.css. The two latter have the latest 1.24wmf22 as mentioned below in #Tech News: 2014-39, so maybe all wikis will soon get the space automatically for those who see the text. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:37, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia got 1.24wmf22 today and the space is now there. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:27, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Page View Statistics problem?

Hello,

When I click on "Page View Statistics" (under Page Information/External Tools) for any article, I get the response, "internal server error." Any ideas? Thanks, -Classicfilms (talk) 16:56, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I also get it currently. It's an external tool made and run by a volunteer editor who can be contacted at User talk:Henrik. The tool is often down or missing recent days. The Wikimedia Foundation runs another tool on Labs at https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikiviewstats/ but it's also down currently (probably for unrelated reasons). PrimeHunter (talk) 18:42, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks PrimeHunter. I left a note on User talk:Henrik's page. I didn't know about the tool run by the Wikimedia Foundation, so thanks for the heads up. I will check it out as well once it is fixed. Regards, -Classicfilms (talk) 19:20, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

To my knowledge the Labs tool is not run by the WMF, it's run by another volunteer. Ironholds (talk) 05:58, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Maybe "run by" was the wrong term. I meant https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikiviewstats/ runs on WMF servers and http://stats.grok.se does not. The latter works again. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:42, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Actually, Analytics bought Henrik a new server, so ;p. Still, bikeshedding. Ironholds (talk) 11:13, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Query archiving

Hi,

Not sure if I am in the right place for such question, but; is it O.K. to use query archiving {{Query web archive}} over |archiveurl=? Or its became dead practice? See, I first met query archiving on Tokyo ESP article, and decided to do the same to Chili Davis and 3 other articles. If its preferred either way, then I will continue to use query, if not, I will revert my changes.--Mishae (talk) 17:16, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

For references, |archiveurl= should be used, not {{Query web archive}}. The reason is that the point is to not link to just any version of the webpage. Webpages can change. That is why we have the |accessdate= to record the date on which you verified the contents of the webpage supported the text in the Wikipedia article. We want the same for links to archives. Ideally, we don't want just any archive. We want a version that is close to what the page was at the time the article text was verified against the source. If you are looking for an archive for a dead link it is best to select one which is closest to the version on the date specified buy the ~~|archiveurl=~~|accessdate= parameter.

{{Query web archive}} is helpful when trying to find the appropriate archive to which to link. You also might want to check out Wikipedia:Link rot#Internet archives. In addition to more information it contains some bookmarklets which will cause the page you are currently viewing to be searched for on Archive.org, WebCite and using the Mementos interface. Mementos searches multiple archives at one time, but is buggy (false negatives, etc.) so should not be your only search. I find those bookmarklets to be quite useful when fixing dead links. — Makyen (talk) 04:53, 24 September 2014 (UTC); fix a mistake to prevent confusion 10:34, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree, but I think you meant, when fixing a dead link, look for the archive that is closest to the date specified by the |accessdate= parameter. And if you keep the |accessdate= parameter, leave it set to the date specified by the original editor. Don't reset it to the date when you accessed the archive. --Margin1522 (talk) 06:30, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, you are correct. That was a failure on my part to catch a cut&paste error (now corrected).

If there is more than one archive version, then yes you should select the one that appears most likely to be the version viewed by the person who verified the reference. This is usually the archive that was made on the date closest to the |accessdate=, but not always. Sometimes it is necessary to go back to the article history to determine when the reference was added to the article. This can require going back through multiple versions of the reference changing over years. Once archives have been located, you should always view the archive version just to check for any gross issues (e.g. an archived 404 error, etc.).

The |accessdate= should be the date of the version of the webpage which has been checked by a human to verify that the reference supports the text in the Wikipedia article. If it is that you find an archive for a dead link, and you verify that it supports the text in the article, then you should change the |accessdate= to match the date of the archive you verified against(not the date you performed the verification). If you want to put that information in, feel free to leave a wiki-text comment. If you just find the archive without re-verifying the text, then you should leave the |accessdate= as it was, or add it from revision history information if it does not exist. If the source is the web then the |accessdate= is considered a required parameter. If the source was a physical copy, then |accessdate= is considered optional. There is, however, no consensus that |accessdate= should be removed if it already exists and is not required (people argue both for keeping it and for removal). — Makyen (talk) 10:34, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

O.K. Then explain to me why the article such as Kyo Kara Maoh! uses query if its wrong?--Mishae (talk) 22:36, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

{{Query web archive}} injects classes, therefore it will corrupt the COinS metadata int the citation templates. I am tagging it as not COinS safe. -- Gadget850^talk 23:27, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

@Gadget850: You didn't answered my question: Why it O.K. for an article such as Kyo Kara Maoh! to use it, if, as you said is ending up corrupting files??? Why then that template exists if its bad? If the template is corrupt should we tag it for deletion? In my opinion if the template is not used or is corrupt, we should ask consensus to agree to its deletion. Who needs a corrupt template?--Mishae (talk) 00:14, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

As a side note, I have reverted most of the queries. Also, while user @Makyen: have kindly showed me Internet Archives, I would like to show him another section Wikipedia:Link rot#Mitigating a dead link which to my knowledge shows that using queries is O.K. If I misunderstood the mitigating/query reference please let me know. Also, I would like to invite user @Ironholds: for mutual understanding between the parties.--Mishae (talk) 00:16, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

3x(edit conflict) In addition to the COinS issue:

My opinion is that having {{Query web archive}} in references is bad. From a reader's perspective they see that and go "WTF does that mean? Query what? why? for what? how is that affecting this reference?". You are placing a set of links on the page which are useful only when someone is attempting to find an archive of the desired page. It would be much better for you to perform preemptive archiving and actually include a working |archiveurl=, |archivedate=, and add |deadurl=no. That way the link to the known working archive already exists on the page. When the reference's link goes dead all that has to happen is to change to |deadurl=yes, or remove that parameter. If it helps, there are bookmarklets on Wikipedia:Citing_sources which will make a request of either Archive.org or WebCite to create an archive of whatever page you are currently viewing. Then all you have to do to create the archive of a page you are citing is to click on the bookmarklet, copy the URL for the resulting archive page to |archiveurl=, fill in |archivedate=, and |deadurl=no.

@Mishae:Wikipedia:Link rot#Mitigating a dead link says "A simple search engine query might locate an appropriate alternative". That does not mean put the {{Query web archive}} template on the page. In context, it means that if you have not been able repair the dead link (in part by looking for an archive), you might be able to find an alternate source by using a search engine. The fact that the text shares the word "query" is not relevant. — Makyen (talk) 00:40, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Certain archives such as Archive.org blocks certain urls such as The Washington Post and USA Today, meantime Wikiwix blocks The New York Times. So, I had a feeling that if used only for websites which are present in all 4 archives it will be a good practice. User @Ironholds: said he seen no problem in them, but to be safe I decided to ask you, and got completely the opposite.--Mishae (talk) 01:01, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

@Mishae: The use in that article is incorrect. The editor who used it did not know the issues and the template was not tagged until today. The archive sites block those sites because they honor the sites robots exclusion standard. -- Gadget850^talk 01:31, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

FYI: I added a bookmarklet for searching Wikiwix to Wikipedia:Link rot#Internet archives and Wikipedia:Citing sources#Preventing and repairing dead links. — Makyen (talk) 01:51, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

O.K. That solves everything. Thank you very much and happy editing!--Mishae (talk) 02:33, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

@Mishae:, in regards to your ping of me, every response I've given on this subject is that I have absolutely no knowledge or opinion of the questions you're asking. I have nothing to contribute to any discussion about it. I hope this is clear enough. Ironholds (talk) 05:56, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Table sort question

I'm trying to create a sortable table, but I am missing something, probably very simple.

I read Help:Sorting and I am trying to use the data-sort-value attribute.

In User:Sphilbrick/Gender Gap resources, I copied the example from the help page at the top, then added my table below.

One difference, probably important, is that I have one data entry per row, which is necessary, due to the table generator I am using.

I don't get how the top table knows that one of the entries should not be displayed, but used as the sort key, while in the table below, it simply displays the entry.

I think I need more pipes somewhere, but I'm not seeing it. --S Philbrick (Talk) 20:33, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

@Sphilbrick: The data-sort-value has to be on the same line as the cell it goes with. It should be fixed now. Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:48, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks --S Philbrick (Talk) 12:43, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Rendering/loop problem with multiple empty columns-list template on a page in Chrome

An editor reported a problem at the help desk on a page (List of Yoshukai Yudansha), where the page would not load. This was indeed the case in Chrome, where the browser was in an apparent loop (one Chrome thread/process running 100% of one CPU - Windows, FWIW) trying to render the page.

After playing with this a bit it seems like the problem is triggered by having a number of empty {{columns-list}} template transclusions on the page. For fewer empty columns-lists, it appears to cause a rendering problem (although I believe that to be a lesser symptom of the loop). For example, User:Rwessel/t6, with eight empty columns-lists, shows the rendering problem, and it also renders quite slowly. Note the messed up stack of section headings. The A is OK, B has its bottom cut of and inserted in the next column, bits of the other section headers are scattered in an odd way to the right. User:Rwessel/t7 has enough empty columns-list entries (19) that it either renders extremely slowly (several minutes on an old-ish P4D I'm using for this), or not at all, with one Chrome process/thread using 100% of a CPU. Even if this does render, adding a few more sections should be enough to cause the problem

Presumably there's something odd in the generated HTML when an empty columns-list is processed. It may not be a true loop, but it feels like there may be an exponential algorithm being invoked for rendering placement. I'm not sure if there is a problem in template:div col (which is used internally by template:columns-list, or in the underlying software, or in Chrome, but something is going wrong here. Rwessel (talk) 06:04, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

@Rwessel: The {{columns-list}} template is a wrapper for {{div col}}. That template may be used in two ways, although only one is documented: the normal way is to put {{div col}} (which emits an opening <div> tag) before a list, and {{div col end}} (which emits a closing </div> tag) after the list; the undocumented way (added by Edokter with this edit at 12:02, 1 December 2013‎) is to pass the list into {{div col}} through the |content= parameter; this wraps the list in <div>...</div> tags, and so the {{div col end}} may be omitted. This (undocumented) usage relies on |content= being non-blank, in order to trigger the closing </div> tag without which a {{div col end}} would still be necessary. So in cases like that at this version of List of Yoshukai Yudansha, which has 18 instances of

{{columns-list|3|

}}

, there are 18 cases of {{div col}} with a blank |content= parameter, and so 18 cases of an unclosed <div>. I suggest amending {{Columns-list}} so that it only calls {{div col}} if there is a list - if it has no list, it does nothing. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:01, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

New bar above page version: background colour suggestion

When opening a version of a page from the History listing, a bar now appears showing "This is the current version..." or "This is an old version..." The bar has a pink background. I expect its main purpose is to emphasise the warning if you are about to edit an old version. It would be still more useful if "current version" were distinguished from "old version" by a different background: perhaps transparent (no colour) for current version, retaining the pink for an old version: Noyster (talk), 10:18, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

@Noyster: Those bars are MediaWiki:Revision-info and MediaWiki:Revision-info-current, which have been pink boxes since March 2007, although they did not take on their present colours until November 2008 (there is plenty on the matter on their talk pages). Since you say "a bar now appears", presumably you had not seen them before, so possibly you have recently changed your language setting to normal en from en-gb or en-ca, which have much plainer messages: MediaWiki:Revision-info/en-gb, MediaWiki:Revision-info/en-ca, MediaWiki:Revision-info-current/en-gb, MediaWiki:Revision-info-current/en-ca. Normal en is always a better choice than either en-gb or en-ca, because it's kept up to date with software changes whereas the other two aren't. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:39, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

That's right, I recently changed my language settings in response to a popup saying that British English was "not recommended" (although many Brits and others may have another opinion on what is "normal English"). Anyhow, even if the boxes and their format are not new, I still think a contrast between what is shown for current and old versions would be an improvement: Noyster (talk), 12:15, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

To summarize, you would like the bar to change colors when it is displaying the "this is the current version" banner? — xaosflux ^Talk 12:25, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Done though I may get trout slapped (or reverted) for being bold in the the mediawiki space, additional discussion can be had at MediaWiki talk:Revision-info-current. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:30, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

@Noyster: I use the term "normal" as in "the default language for this particular Wikipedia", which being the English Wikipedia, is English - n.b. not American English, but an internationalised form. I'm English - born less than 25 miles from the home of the OED and currently less than 10 miles away - and am willing to tolerate misspellings like "color" when they occur in MediaWiki messages because I know what the intent is. I also know what a hassle it is maintaining system messages in multiple languages: I used to work for a firm where we produced software with six language settings - there was only one English, but two French because our French and Belgian customers couldn't agree whether 90 was "quatre-vingt-dix" or "nonante". There, we had six. Here, we have something like 398. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:21, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Could section preview have refs?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T7984

I've noticed that an automatic references section appeared at the bottom talk pages (though alas, without a section header). But would it be possible to put one of those at the bottom of the preview for editing a section??? I am so sick of having to enter a cite template blind because it won't preview, then finding out I fouled it up! Wnt (talk) 14:21, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

I often add {{reflist}}, preview, and remove {{reflist}} before saving. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:30, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, yeah, but usually I think I had it right and it's not worth the trouble...

On a related note, can somebody with access fix the "Editing help(opens in new window)" that appears when you edit. There ought to be a space, and since I have my eyes in "proofreading mode" I hit on it every time. Wnt (talk) 14:35, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Heh, I've hidden that link with CSS for ages … I forgot it was there! That said, those are actually two different messages, MediaWiki:Edithelp and MediaWiki:Newwindow. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 14:56, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

@Wnt: Re: "Editing help(opens in new window)" - See #Below editing window above, for more about that problem. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

See T7984 (Edit preview doesn't let you preview cite.php footnotes) and Help:Footnotes#Previewing edits which recommends using {{reflistp}}. -- Gadget850^talk 17:00, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

There are a couple of user scripts which automatically place a reference list at the end of a section preview. Personally, I am using user:js/ajaxPreview with the options (code is placed in your your common.js, or to your skin js page):

importScript('User:Js/ajaxPreview.js'); // [[user:js/ajaxPreview]]
//Config:
var ajaxPreviewPos = 'bottom'; //buttons on the bottom, replacing 
                               //the standard buttons, but also
                               //  have smaller buttons which  
                               //  perform the normal function.
// code to execute after each preview update
window.ajaxPreviewExec = function(previewArea) {
  mw.loader.using( [
    'jquery.tablesorter',
    'jquery.makeCollapsible'
  ], function(){
    $( 'table.sortable' ).tablesorter();
    $( '#wikiPreview .collapsible' ).makeCollapsible();
  } );
}

Note that the "PATCH TO REVIEW" status of bug 5984 is actually inaccurate. The patch has been abandoned. Thus, this bug is actually awaiting someone to work on it. — Makyen (talk) 17:40, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

I've been trying to update the status on the Cite bugs but had not gotten to that one; changed it to New. Add the other script to the help page.-- Gadget850^talk 17:54, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies! I should ask though - the objection I see in bugzilla is that you have to check through the whole preview to see if there's a <references> tag in the section you're previewing already. But is there any way you could just add one of these below the main preview to be used the same way as it would be in the wikitext, i.e. producing no output if all the references had been used up in a preceding reference section? (The Javascript solutions are a good idea, except... I usually keep Javascript off to keep things fast and uncomplicated) Wnt (talk) 18:40, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Use of DIVs

on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Terrorism, the top boxes use a nontraditional div html markup, instead of the Wikitable markup. Normally I wouldn't care less, but in this case there's a strange line running down the left side that is surely caused by this markup. I tried closing the divs in the archive box, but when I hit "show preview" it did not entirely eliminate the issue. Can someone with more wiki markup know-how fix this issue? hbdragon88 (talk) 05:19, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Done, I think. I hope that's not a controversial edit. That is some unusual html markup for WP; I didn't dig into it to try to replace the whole thing. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:19, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

TemplateData editor doesn't save work

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T73363

I created {{bl}} and tried to add TemplateData using the "Manage TemplateData" button. I clicked "Apply", then saved the page. Didn't work for me with either of Monobook and Vector. Am I missing something? Paradoctor (talk) 14:52, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

It's there all right. You added it to the /doc page with this edit. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:32, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

That was a manual edit without using the TemplateData editor. Sorry, should have made that clear. Paradoctor (talk) 16:38, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Done Ok, I found the guilty party: wikEd I'll notify Cacycle. Paradoctor (talk) 17:00, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for this note, and congratulations on figuring out what's going on. I filed a report about this conflict as T73363 so that the devs working on TemplateData will know about it. They may close it soon, but at least they'll know that it happens, and anyone searching there will be able to find it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:24, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Judge Judy article on Russian WP

Not sure where to post this TBH. Anyway, the Russian article wiki article for Judith Sheindlin is showing her as being deceased in 2012 ("10 февраля 2012"). This is in the infobox and populates a category. For the life of me, I can't find where this actual text is in the article (it's only a stub over there) and can't remove it. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 18:25, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

It looks like it's pulling from Wikidata. I'll revert the vandalism. Ironholds (talk) 18:53, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Done. Something done through one of Magnus's automated tools, I think? Ironholds (talk) 18:56, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Brilliant - thanks for that. There's a bunch of articles in the same boat (from WP:LIVINGDEAD). Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 19:10, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Intermittent 403 on server resources

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T73385

I am getting completely random occurences of 403 errors on server resources like this arrow image, causing it not to display. Hitting reload several times will show the problem. What is causing this? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 20:33, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Since you are trying out HHVM, I would suspect that. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:31, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

How can that affect pulling static HTTP resources? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:25, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

I just tested it, and that is indeed the cause. I've opened bugzilla:71385 about it. User:BDavis (WMF) on IRC says it's probably because of a file permissions problem on one of the HHVM servers. Jackmcbarn (talk) 17:48, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Can't use → directly in edit summaries

I first raised this point at the Teahouse and was advised to bring it here instead. Until recently I have been able to simply click on the arrow symbol to insert it in the edit summary bar, but now if I click on it the arrow is inserted at the last position I was at in the main body of the article, even though I have clicked in the summary bar before clicking on the arrow. Now I find that I have to do a copy/paste to get it in there. Is this a software glitch? If so will things return to the way they were? I'm using Google chrome and my preferences are set for the Vector skin. The problem doesn't appear on IE but it does on Safari. Jodosma (talk) 09:38, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

It works on my end, using Chrome on Windows. But then again, I'm using the old CharInsert bar. The new edit toolbar above the edit window does not work in the edit summary. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:47, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Works as intended in Firefox, Monobook, WP:REFTOOLS 1.0, no WikiEd, no Visual Editor, no Media Viewer. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:47, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Are you using wikEd? I have the same issue. When I disable wikEd for a moment, CharInsert works as intended. Paradoctor (talk) 13:16, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

I have had WikEd enabled for ages. But this only started about a week or so ago. Somehow the software has changed. I have not made any changes of any kind which would affect my access to the arrow. Some software guy must be responsible. Jodosma (talk) 16:44, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

I dimly remember having had this problem a couple of years ago, so I doubt that this is due to a change in the software. CharInsert seems to have had no substantial change other than localization for years, and the latest change to wikEd appears blameless, too. BTW, that the problem doesn't appear on IE for you is another hint that this is the clash between wikEd and CharInsert: On IE, wikEd does not work!

Paradoctor (talk) 02:53, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-40

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

Recent software changes

On Commons, you can now see what files are most used across all wikis. You can also see the same list for deleted or uncreated files. [47] [48]
There are now many more translations for language names. [49]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf1) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 30, and on all Wikipedias on October 2 (calendar).
Errors from Scribunto (Lua) are now shown on the page. Before, you had to click on "Script error" to see them. [50] [51]
You can add an "autovalue" for a field in TemplateData. When users add the template to a page, the value will be added automatically. An example is when a clean-up template shows the date it was added. [52]
If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it. [53] [54]
The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats. [55]

Future changes

You can watch a video showing Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. You can also read more about the move from Bugzilla.
JavaScript authors: Many old methods will be removed soon. Please check your scripts and gadgets and replace the old methods by the new ones if needed. [56]

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

09:44, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Spurious text on source links

When using a screen reader with Wikipedia, often sources in the references list will have this kind of text apended to them:

ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3ASelective+breeding&rft.atitle=Artificial+Selection%3A+A+Powerful+Tool+for+Ecologists&rft.au=Conner%2C+Jeffrey&rft.aufirst=Jeffrey&rft.aulast=Conner&rft.date=July+2003&rft.genre=article&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu%2Fstable%2F3449986%3Fseq%3D2%26Search%3Dyes%26searchText%3Dplant%26searchText%3Dartificial%26searchText%3Dselection%26list%3Dhide%26searchUri%3D%252Faction%252FdoAdvancedSearch%253Fq0%253Dartificial%252Bselection%2526f0%253Dall%2526c1%253DAND%2526q1%253Dplant%2526f1%253Dall%2526acc%253Don%2526wc%253Don%2526fc%253Doff%2526Search%253DSearch%2526sd%253D%2526ed%253D%2526la%253D%2526pt%253D%2526isbn%253D%26prevSearch%3D%26item%3D2%26ttl%3D30905%26returnArticleService%3DshowFullText%26resultsServiceName%3Dnull&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1890%2F0012-9658%282003%29084%5B1650%3Aasaptf%5D2.0.co%3B2&rft.issue=7&rft.jtitle=Ecology&rft.pages=1650-1660&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.volume=84

Does anyone know what causes this? Finn Turner. see my user page 21:19, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

@FninnTurner: Yes, that is the COinS metadata. It's held in the title= attribute of a <span>...</span> element which contains nothing apart from another <span>...</span> element, which itself encloses a non-breaking space. More at WP:COINS. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:50, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

In your example (the first reference at [57]) it's extra long due to a 445-character url [58] an editor entered in the citation:

{{cite journal|last=Conner|first=Jeffrey|title=Artificial Selection: A Powerful Tool for Ecologists|journal=Ecology|date=July 2003|volume=84|issue=7|page=1650-1660|url=http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/stable/3449986?seq=2&Search=yes&searchText=plant&searchText=artificial&searchText=selection&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoAdvancedSearch%3Fq0%3Dartificial%2Bselection%26f0%3Dall%26c1%3DAND%26q1%3Dplant%26f1%3Dall%26acc%3Don%26wc%3Don%26fc%3Doff%26Search%3DSearch%26sd%3D%26ed%3D%26la%3D%26pt%3D%26isbn%3D&prevSearch=&item=2&ttl=30905&returnArticleService=showFullText&resultsServiceName=null|accessdate=16 December 2013|doi=10.1890/0012-9658(2003)084[1650:asaptf]2.0.co;2}}

Long url's like that can often be shortened but here it's a restricted access site so I cannot experiment with it. I know nothing about screen readers and don't know whether there is a way to avoid getting the text. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:05, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

I dropped some messages around the place; plus, Graham87 (talk · contribs), who does use a screen reader, is a regular here. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:18, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

That citation can (should!) be rewritten:

{{cite journal|last=Conner|first=Jeffrey|title=Artificial Selection: A Powerful Tool for Ecologists|journal=Ecology|date=July 2003|volume=84|issue=7|page=1650-1660 |jstor=3449986 |doi=10.1890/0012-9658(2003)084[1650:asaptf]2.0.co;2}}

The jstor identifer comes from the url just after/stable/.

I don't quite know if there is anything we can do about screenreaders reading the COinS metadata. I don't have any experience with screen readers. Is this the first report of this issue? COinS has been part of CS1 for a long time.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:19, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

@FninnTurner: What screen reader and version are you using? Looks like the specific article is Selective breeding. -- Gadget850^talk 23:44, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

I discovered this when I upgraded to JAWS 12 a couple of years ago; it occurs in IE but not in Firefox (and I generally prefer the way IE renders Wikipedia with JAWS, so I use that browser). I reported it to Freedom Scientific once but received no response. Graham87 03:30, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Missing argument for \mathcal

MathJax, for some reason, has problem handling something like \hat\mathcal{O} which is legit tex markup. \hat{\mathcal{O}} is handled properly.

{\hat {\mathcal {O}}}

{\hat {\mathcal {O}}}

This affects many articles, such as quantum limit. Please fix this soon. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:42, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

That's a MediaWiki feature; you probably want bugzilla. Ironholds (talk) 18:52, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

That's a disappointing response from a member of WMF staff. Perhaps "Let me help you report that", or "I can report that for you", might have been more appropriate? Deltahedron (talk) 17:29, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Pagemove edit lacks information

Please look at the history of User:Weekly Shōnen Jump, a userpage for a nonexistent user. About 20 hours ago, Missing, gone fishing created a sandbox, User:Missing, gone fishing/sandbox, and after a few edits, moved it (without reason that I can see) to Weekly S.J. Please look at the page history for the edit that involved the move — there's no mention of the page size in this edit's entry. No numbers, as they would be incorrect, since it was blank, but also no (blank) as in the previous edit or in my first edit. Why not? Is something broken (in which case, should we report it?), or is it something that we can freely ignore? Nyttend (talk) 03:06, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

@Nyttend: This happens because the page was empty when it was moved. I can reproduce this elsewhere, so I can start working on a fix with no need to keep that particular page around. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:19, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

I reproduced the results my moving the redirect at User:Missing, gone fishing/sandbox to User:Bb. As in the other case (where I think Missing, gone fishing wanted to move it to Weekly Shōnen Jump, but the move interface is confusing when moving a user page), the log for the target has nothing about the move. Note that Bb is registered, so it's not something that happens to only unregistered usernames. --NE2 03:21, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

[edit conflict] In that case, it can be deleted (so I did). Jack, please reproduce this and link it as soon as possible, so that non-admins don't have to wonder what this kind of thing looks like. Nyttend (talk) 03:24, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

This is reproducible by moving any empty page. It doesn't seem to be a big deal. I've created gerrit:163458 to fix this problem; best case, the fix will be live here on October 9th. (Note that this will only make new moves work right; revisions from old moves will stay broken.) Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:57, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the help! I wanted reproduceability so that the developers would know what to do; I didn't know you were one of them. Curious, why the 9th? Do we already have a code update coming then? Nyttend (talk) 04:01, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

All updates to MediaWiki get deployed here the second Thursday after they're accepted, so if this gets accepted by the 2nd, it will be here on the 9th. Jackmcbarn (talk) 04:06, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

@Nyttend: The patch got accepted today, so it will be live here on the 9th. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:59, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good. Thanks a lot! Nyttend (talk) 15:01, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Redirect

When typing a URL and it redirects, the URL updates - type in Criticism of YouTube and the URL is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube , while it should stay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_YouTube . Could this be fixed, because I do not want to be confused about the URL. Plus, MediaWiki didn't think about this, but it makes working with redirects more difficult. On all browsers this occurs. Go on a double redirect, press reload and it takes you somewhere else. I'd at least have an option in user preferences to not change URLs - I added a comment on Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals and after a few replies, they were just feedback. A Great Catholic Person (talk) 04:54, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Some formerly separate articles get merged; this is a normal WP process. But you can add a section header to the article name, as I demonstrate with your request. You remain free to edit that section after clicking the link you list above. You can add the redirect to your watchlist, as well, in the redirect page, just click the watchlist-star to turn it blue. It is no longer a separate article, but you can update the redirect if the header is altered. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 05:14, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Or perhaps you might make the redirect #redirect[[Criticism_of_Google#YouTube]] instead. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 05:19, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

I am noticing a bounce in the redirect to the foot of the article. Sometimes it settles down. Suggestions, anyone? Ancheta Wis (talk) 05:24, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

@Ancheta Wis: A Great Catholic Person (talk · contribs) is referring to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 130#URL changes when I am on a redirect and several other similar threads that they started. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:28, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

@A Great Catholic Person: Re "Go on a double redirect, press reload and it takes you somewhere else", that's a known issue I reported as T73002. Looks like I'll need to fix it myself. Matma Rex talk 15:07, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Ancheta Wis (talk · contribs), Redrose64 (talk · contribs), Matma Rex (talk · contribs), Thank you all for your replies, but I really want to ask whoever made this change to add user preference option - no one in WP:Gadget/proposals responded. It looks like, after reading threads I've started, Matma Rex made this upsetting tech development. If this does not get fixed, I get more and more angry until something bad happens to me. See Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals#URL updating. A Great Catholic Person (talk) 16:00, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Ancheta Wis (talk · contribs) I don't completely understand you, but does this mean it gets rid of the issue a bit? Thanks.A Great Catholic Person (talk) 16:26, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Matma Rex (talk · contribs) After reading an earlier thread on this, you must be the one who made this change. Is it possible for you to make the preference of not updating URL? Why won't you make the option as well for people who do not like this? I'll stop complaining on here once that is available. A Great Catholic Person (talk) 16:50, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

@A Great Catholic Person: If you read the earlier discussion, then you're aware this was a long-standing feature request backed by a number of people. The only reason redirects didn't work like this since the day they were invented is because it wasn't possible to do this back then. Adding a preference for it would be counterproductive.

It should, however, be easy to write a user script to bring back the old titles. In the simplest version it could look like the code below (you can paste this in your common.js page). Note that I did not properly test it, it might not work in some cases, and I won't be available to help you if it somehow crashes your browser or renders Wikipedia inaccessible. That said…

// Restore the URL of the redirect page after being redirected
if ( mw.config.get( 'wgRedirectedFrom' ) ) {
	mw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.Title' ).done( function () {
		history.replaceState(
			/*data=*/ history.state,
			/*title=*/ document.title,
			/*url=*/ ( new mw.Title( mw.config.get( 'wgRedirectedFrom' ) ) ).getUrl()
		);
	} )
}

…should be all that's needed to get the rudimentary functionality of restoring the original URL. (The "new" one will flash for an instant, and this probably won't work as you expect for redirects to sections; the former is unfixable, the latter could be fixed with some cleverness.) Matma Rex talk 23:03, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Matma Rex (talk · contribs) Nah... I'm afraid because of what you said. Any alternative method? (I'll try to do this on my school computers, not my own, because I don't want it to break.) Or, could you actually test it? (Sorry but I want this to be a verified method of getting old URL without issues.) A Great Catholic Person (talk) 01:47, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

It works for me, with the caveat about flicker and links to sections. Matma Rex talk 08:25, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Matma Rex (talk · contribs) It's safe? Nothing happened to you? I'll think about that later.A Great Catholic Person (talk) 01:46, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

most visited pages created by a user

Hi. Is there any online tool to show "all pages created by a user in Descending Order of their traffic statistics in a specific month"?

something like http://stats.grok.se, but with the ability to show the traffic statistics of the all pages created by the user in that month; then the user can consider a good priority plan for improving his articles. Ashkan P. (talk) 15:51, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

You may wish to talk with West.andrew.g. He's figured out how to get the raw hit counts for articles through an automated process. You'd probably need to add articles to your list manually and let Andrew's script update their hit counts. Nyttend (talk) 16:26, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

WM labs having issues again?

Whenever I click the {{GeoGroupTemplate}} links (either Google or Bing) here and at Commons, I'm instantly taken to a 404 error page, and the same is true for a single appearance of {{coord}}, e.g. this URL. The instantaneous nature of the error makes me suspect that something really basic isn't working at tools.wmflabs.org, since thing1-isnt-talking-to-thing2 errors (ones with stuff just not set up rightly) tend to take more than ½ second to resolve as errors. Any idea what's happened? Nyttend (talk) 18:06, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, labs is down ATM, being worked on. Max Semenik (talk) 18:49, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Understood. Is there a place where I can look up the status, so I don't have to ask next time? Nyttend (talk) 19:03, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Abandonment of Reflinks

There is no reason to disable Reflinks [59] and other useful tools just to make people come here and sign a petition. I believe community consensus would be to keep those tools working. Be rather hypocritical to force your will upon others, in order to make them protest someone else doing the same thing here. Dream Focus 00:20, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: It appears that Dispenser's tools were blocked by the WMF, not taken offline to encourage petition signing. GoingBatty (talk) 00:52, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

First they just have the protest encouragement there, then suddenly they are blocked. No reason to block them though, not with such popular tools being used for years now. Just happened the moment they tried protesting. I find it unlikely it can be unrelated. Dream Focus 00:57, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

You may think it unlikely, but it is unrelated. It came to the attention of the admins that Dispenser was violating the Labs Terms of use, in particular in having and running non-free software. He was asked to remove such software and refused, hence the block and the message GoingBatty linked. Some of the conversation leading up to this situation is in the #wikimedia-labs logs starting around timestamp 19:42:50. Anomie ⚔ 01:58, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

It is indeed unrelated. — Dispenser 03:34, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

So much for IAR. I rely heavily on Reflinks. Too bad that WMF didn't consider the value of these tools to the project before simply switching them off. - Mr X 15:43, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

This WMF action also includes the shut down of two of Dispenser's tools used on the DYK nomination templates: Dab links and Checklinks. — Maile (talk) 16:13, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
- WMF's response reminds me of Dogma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=556RU1jPdIc.--v/r - TP 01:03, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  - Reply - Bring back Reflinks! That is all! --Jax 0677 (talk) 06:56, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  - Reply Bring back Reflinks. It is an invaluable tool and I relied on it. It is too onerous to convert footnotes from bare URLs manually and the number of those in the pages I work on are piling up at a great rate as users are too lazy to use the Wiki cite templates. --P123ct1 (talk) 08:36, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
Missing this tool: I am missing this tool. This has been a very useful one. (after reading this notice) --Tito☸Dutta 17:11, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
- - Reply Yes. Bring back Reflinks. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:41, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
@Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Jax 0677, P123ct1, Titodutta, and Maile66: if you read up you'll see that the tool shutdown has nothing to do with the superprotect right or Dispenser's opinion on it; he shut them down in a fit of pique after he was banned from labs, quite rightfully, for hosting non-free software in direct violation of the labs terms of use. Ironholds (talk) 04:36, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

@Ironholds: thank you. Looks like I did not read the main post here. The tool is a useful one and I was missing it and got this thread's link in a notice (linked in my last post, just above). Why are they linking this thread, if it is unrelated? (posted using android) --Tito☸Dutta 04:49, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
I don't know; that's a question for Dispenser. I'd guess either a continuation of said fit of pique, or a feeling that superprotect and his banning are linked in consisting of "occasions on which the WMF has said no to something" (which I don't think is a decent comparison, since in the case of the banning, what they said no to was 'terms of use violations', but..) Ironholds (talk) 11:38, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Ironholds, well however and why ever things happened, the fact remains that Dispenser had tools that are needed. If Dispenser is not providing these at this time, perhaps WMF can provide replacements:

1) Reflinks

2) Dablinks

3) Dabsolver

4) Webcheck links

5) Watcher

— Maile (talk) 18:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

No idea; I don't make WMF product decisions. These tools are widely used, yes (I use them); I think the answer is for them to be resurrected by someone not interested in violating the site's TOU. Ironholds (talk) 02:00, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@Ironholds: Or perhaps it isn't Dispenser who doesn't know why he is angry but the WMF. Perhaps it is superprotect and NOT his WMF Labs ban that has spurred this action. Afterall, it's not like it wasn't a piece of cake for him to set up his own web hosting. Seems more logical that he would protest something he can't control, like superprotect, than something that is quite easy for him to overcome.--v/r - T P 18:32, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Or perhaps he refuses to change his behaviour and so the two are roughly analogous. It's kind of irrelevant; we're just hypothesising here. The fact that his ban is complained about in BIG LETTERS and superprotect in small letters is indicative, however. Ironholds (talk) 02:00, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I thought the superprotect message was already there, and he added the message in big letters when he was banned from toolserver. (I thought it was in big letters to differentiate it as more directly relevant, though this doesn't seem to be very successful.) Anyway, this is kind of off topic. —PC -XT + 05:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I've just hacked together a non-VE client to the Citoid server which hopefully does a similar job to reflink. Just add importScript('User:Salix alba/Citoid.js'); to your Special:MyPage/skin.js. It uses mw:citoid service and borrows heavily from the VE interface User:Mvolz/veCiteFromURL. It works by adding a toolbox link, click on this and you get a dialog popup where you can enter a url, submit it to the server and get a citation template as a result. See User:Salix alba/Citoid for details.

Its very much an pre-alpha release, virtually untested but worked for the first two urls I tried. Very much open source, people are encouraged to clone adapt to their own needs.--Salix alba (talk): 16:41, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Congratulations, you've just done a hell of a lot more for Wikipedia content than the WMF has done in months. KonveyorBelt

Credit should really go to @Mvolz: who been working on Citoid as part of Wikimedia's mw:FOSS Outreach Program for Women.--Salix alba (talk): 22:10, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Sadly, Marielle's summer program has officially ended. The Editing team will be supporting the rest of the work. I've used it in my volunteer account for VisualEditor; see this diff for how to enable it in your own account. The important thing to note is that this is still at the strictly experimental stage. It is unlikely to corrupt any pages (it shouldn't save anything on its own), but the service could fall over at any moment. If that happens, it should restart on its own, but it is really not ready for high-volume use. Feel free to leave feedback at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback even if you're using it in the wikitext editor; Salix alba and I both frequently look in at that page.

Once it is stable, the ultimate plan is to make it available for both VisualEditor and the wikitext editor at all WMF projects. Outside of the biggest, very few of them have any citation filling scripts at the moment, so this will be a big improvement in the end. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:36, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): "The Editing team will be supporting the rest of the work." What does this mean? Do you have project milestones, dates, etc.? --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:48, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

That depends, NeilN: Do you believe timelines written by people whose job titles include the word "manager" or "director"?

If so, then it will allegedly be deployed (in at least a minimal fashion) for VisualEditor (only) at the end of September. More realistically, I expect it to be up and running in VisualEditor later this calendar year. I've not been told a date for extending it to the wikitext editor; all I've heard is that it will happen after it's running in VisualEditor.

I'm not certain about the current status, but a couple of weeks ago, it needed work on service stability and a way to make it generalizable or customizable. Stability has improved since then, but has it improved enough for regular use on a very large wiki like this one? I just don't know. I've not heard anything about the rest of the work. (How to convert each URL into a ref was hardcoded in the software back in July. This is okay as a temporary measure, when you're working on keeping the thing up and running, but it's very bad for long-term use and for expansion.) I don't have enough information to know whether they'll meet this original target, but they're really not shy about having the schedule slip. It will get rolled out when the devs believe that it's reasonably ready, not when some manager's timeline says it should be ready. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Reflinks, Dablinks, Dabsolver, Webcheck link, Watcher. These are tools that the community uses to help improve Wikipedia on a daily basis and has repeatedly said is important to their workflow process. Is there a good reason that after all this time, we don't have native tools that perform the same or similar tasks? Why isn't the WMF listening? Is it because they no longer represent the community? Viriditas (talk) 20:39, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Wholly support preceding comment by Viriditas. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:49, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
- Linked without further comment: [60] --NeilN ^{talk to me} 21:06, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Why are we going through all this again? As I noted at 23:24, 1 July 2014 (two months ago), and also at 20:34, 2 July 2014, it is not the job of the WMF to provide gadgets (or other user scripts); they are kind enough to provide hardware where such tools may be hosted, something that they are not obliged to do. It is us, the community, who provide and maintain the gadgets. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:25, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

They shutdown the Toolserver hosting the gadgets, did they not? You can't have it both ways, and somebody must take responsibility for the overwhelming pattern here: the most important tools used by editors are made unavailable while the most bothersome tools that nobody wants are shoved down our throats. You can't escape these facts. Furthermore, while it is certainly a great idea to make everything open source, that consideration should take place before shutting down tools, not after. Putting the cart before the horse benefits nobody. And let's apply this logic to reality. If everything were required to be open source, would we have even evolved as a technological civilization? Would the computer have ever been built? Would we have ever visited the Moon? Designed the telephone? This management style is best described as cutting off the nose to spite the face. Viriditas (talk) 22:49, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

No. WMF did not shut down Toolserver: Wikimedia Deutschland did. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:54, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Wow. That's a serious reality distortion field you've got going on there. Luckily, I can avoid it by setting up a force field like this: [61][62] When you step inside the field, you see this: "Toolserver is in fact hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation...We provide space, power and racks for the toolserver cluster, at a cost of about $65,000/year to WMF according to our Director of TechOps. We also maintain the database replication on our end which enables tools to function....We can't provide the same level of service for the toolserver infrastructure as we do for core operations, and it makes no sense for a chapter to build out the required staffing and expertise to do so (set up/maintain all or some of the aforementioned functions). Even with slightly increased investment, toolserver would always suffer from being second or third tier infrastructure...We're not comfortable hosting the toolserver infrastructure as-is.." Viriditas (talk) 23:02, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

You seem to not be understanding what you're quoting there, Viriditas. Toolserver was run, administered, and (mostly?) paid for by Wikimedia Deutschland. WMF provided space for WMDE's servers in one of their caching datacenters, as well as some technical support (i.e. the database replication feed). When WMDE didn't want to continue to be responsible for the Toolserver, WMF did not want to take it on as-is for various good technical reasons; instead they used the Labs infrastructure they were already setting up to create a "Toolserver 2.0" that would improve on some of the shortcomings of the original Toolserver. Unfortunately there were some people who liked some of those shortcomings (e.g. the lack of a requirement for open-source licenses on all tools, the fact that it was subject to German/European laws, and so on), and they've raised both valid issues and FUD about the situation. Anomie ⚔ 23:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I understood what I read perfectly, and anyone can read it in its original context. The WMF shut down the Toolserver because they wanted to migrate to Labs. That's perfectly clear, and you can argue semantics like an attorney until the cows come home. WMF funded it and hosted it, and made the decision to shut it down through various means. The link is very clear about this: "Chapters are autonomous organizations, and it's WM-DE's call how much whether it wants to continue to invest in infrastructure of any kind (and the decision of funding bodies like the FDC to accept or reject that proposition). However, for our part, we will not continue to support the current arrangement (DB replication, hosting in our data-center, etc.) indefinitely." So, in other words, the WMF made a decision to stop supporting what users want and to start supporting things like Meda Viewer, Visual Editor - things that users don't want. But please, do continue to piss on my leg and tell me that it's raining. Viriditas (talk) 23:45, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

If you claim you understood what you read perfectly and have rejected my clarification, than I can only conclude that you are one of the people spreading FUD about the situation. Please stop, your drama is not helping matters any. Anomie ⚔ 23:50, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

What is this, a totalitarian state run by the WMF? Will you now call for my arrest (ANI) and subsequent execution (indefinite block)? You've reached an all time low. Viriditas (talk) 23:52, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Really? I thought my all-time low on Wikipedia was probably this from back in 2008, which I see has since been deleted. This is nowhere near that one. Anomie ⚔ 00:17, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Viriditas, uh. You know that labs provides the same service as Toolserver, right? Better, in fact. Ironholds (talk) 12:48, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I want to apologize for the delay in my reply. I was very busy laughing, so hard in fact, I almost broke a rib. Are you telling me that you interrupted your busy labor day holiday to tell me that labs provides superior service, so superior that it can't even run Reflinks, Dablinks, Dabsolver, Webcheck links, and Watcher? Is that what you are telling me? I am sorry to tell you this, but Dilbert is a cartoon, it was not meant to be taken literally. This may come as quite a shock to you, but please prepare yourself: the Pointy-Haired Boss is the antagonist, not the hero. Viriditas (talk) 22:44, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

What on earth are you talking about? All of those tools were runnable. They functioned perfectly. Dispenser quit because he was trying to host and run copyrighted, proprietary, third-party software in an effort to steganographically go through uploads. Everything else he wrote worked within the labs environment. If labs was that broken it wouldn't host everything else we use.

I'm hearing a lot of certainty from you: I'm not hearing a lot of facts. You should go get your rib looked at: perhaps they could do a quick spot check on your bile duct, too. Ironholds (talk) 06:32, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Unbelievable. Talk about missing the point by a parsec. In any case, the pattern here is clear for anyone to see. Whenever an editor, any editor says "where are the tools we need?" the response from the Foundation employees and their retinue of sycophants is "it's your fault, it's his fault, she did it, he did it, I didn't do it, they did it, someone else did it, and I'm not responsible". Every time. Nobody seems to take responsibility ever. All we get are excuses. I frankly, don't give a damn about these tools. I'm here (and on other noticeboards) representing the dozens of editors who do care, and I'm making their voice heard by repeating myself over and over again until someone over there finally gets it. Those tools are not running on the labs servers now, and that's the point you missed. I don't give two fucks how you get them running, and I'm tired of the litany of excuses blaming other people for your inability to service the needs of the community. Viriditas (talk) 08:11, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

And I'm tired of people who think that volume makes up for not having anything of value to say, or any valid way of saying it. The WMF's only involvement in any of these tools was creating a hosting environment for those tools to live on; it didn't take up responsibility to keep any piece of volunteer code anyone wrote running. If someone takes their blog down in a fit of pique, do you shout at the web hosting company because your favorite site doesn't exist any more? No, because creating a space for code does not equate to maintaining said code. If you were looking to communicate "the tools are down, why can't the tools come back up", you picked a pretty terrible way of doing it - and if you can't see how, you and the dozens of (clearly invisible, if you feel the need to speak for them) editors you apparently represent can get together and maybe try to come up with some hypothesis for why perhaps your messages above were read as impolite, histrionic and ignorant of the facts.

By the way: there's no "your" or "you" here. I'm not speaking here for the WMF: I've got absolutely nothing to do with Labs. I'm a researcher. I know why Dispenser's tools vanished because I read the logs Anomie posted in this thread five days ago. Evidently you didn't.

If you want to make the argument for using volunteer-created resources as a way of experimenting with things that should be taken over by the WMF and maintained for as long as there is a use for them, you want to go talk to the Editing team directly, as has already been suggested, not rant on a noticeboard in such a way as to drive away people who would otherwise be interested in helping. Personally, I'm done with this thread: there are some good conversations happening, but you and others like you have ensured it has become more heat than light. Ironholds (talk) 08:41, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

All I see in the above are more excuses, more bureaucratic filing of paperwork A with bureaucrat B down the hall in room C. WMF shut Toolserver down to push Labs, yet when the tools the community actually uses and depends on aren't a part of that transition, and the community gets upset about it, it isn't the fault of the WMF? It sounds like you have no use for the community. So you're a researcher, are you trying to figure out a way to automate editing so you can shut people like me up for good? That would solve your problem, wouldn't it. Automate the editing process entirely, get rid of the community and you can run the WMF in peace and quiet without any distractions from anyone. Then you can pat each other on the backs and take long coffee breaks as the bots write the articles and maintain the site. No more angry and disgruntled humans to deal with. Why deal with the dirty community who expects the WMF to represent their best interests when you can just phase them out and replace them with bots who will never complain? Viriditas (talk) 08:56, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Let me put it this way, by analogy. Your local shopping mall is severely damaged in a hurricane. The mall's owner wasn't insured, and can't afford to repair the damage. A new mall is built in the same town by a different company, and when it opens you visit it, only to find that there is no Abercrombie & Fitch. Who do you blame - the owner of the old mall, the owner of the new mall, the hurricane, or A&F? Or perhaps Abercrombie & Fitch did open a new store, but one day you arrive to find that it's closed because the staff are on strike for higher pay. Who do you blame? If your answer to either question is "the owner of the new mall", it's the wrong answer. It is not the responsibility of the WMF to provide tools that the tool writer has declined to support. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:08, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't need or require your false analogy, as I understand exactly what is going on. The WMF no longer has any use for the community. They've got their 20 million and they are good with that. Everyone else can fuck off now, and accept what they are given from up above without question, and if you complain, you'll be told to complain to someone over there and then someone over there, until you're running around in circles all day. The bureaucratic nightmare you've created (because bureaucracy serves only bureucracy, nothing else) is the end result. The community no longer matters. Ironholds' comments are so far from reality, they can only be described as fantasy. He actually called the numerous editors concerned about the missing tools in this very thread "clearly invisible". That is not just beyond the pale, it is indicative of a larger problem that needs to be addressed. These editors are not "clearly invisible" by any means. They are right here, in this thread, demanding that the tools return. They don't care about your ad hoc analogies, and they certainly don't feel better about having tools they don't want shoved down their throat. You can't rationalize this away and pretend it's not a problem. And I don't need to construct a bullshit excuse or analogy to explain the problem, I can tell you exactly what it is. The WMF is spending thousands on software nobody wants or needs and not a single goddamn penny on the tools Wikipedia editors require. Do you understand the problem yet, or do I and dozens of other editors need to explain it to you another hundred times? Do not respond here with another "it's not our problem" excuse, because it is your problem, and the community has told you about the problem over and over again. Make the tools work. Got it? Viriditas (talk) 09:37, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

You seem to be under the misapprehension that I'm somehow connected with the WMF. I'm not, although I did meet some of them a few weeks ago. Rant at me all you like: it won't make me provide any tools whatsoever, because I never intended to; and those who were considering doing so might be less inclined to assist. My concern is that too much blame is being directed at the wrong people. And for the last time: the WMF did not shut Toolserver down: WMDE did. Do you understand that? Like Ironholds, I'm done here. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:53, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

If you will read carefully, you will see that I did not refer to you as "connected" to the WMF. Dispenser claimed that the WMF shutdown the Toolserver and his interpretation of that action is supported by the linked documents above. Your literalist interpretation, however, as to who finally turned off the lights, avoids the central concerns and acts to deflect responsibility from the WMF. There seems to be a culture of avoidance at work here. That many users have expressed their concern with the loss of these tools only to be told they are "clearly invisible", shows that the WMF has completely lost touch with their core mission. Viriditas (talk) 19:19, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Or alternately it shows that (1) you're reading far too much into one editor's statements if you think it says anything about "The WMF" and (2) you don't understand that the immediate read on "I'm here (and on other noticeboards) representing the dozens of editors who do care, and I'm making their voice heard by repeating myself over and over again" suggests that you're talking for people who aren't talking themselves - IOW, people 'invisible' when you look at the conversation. The long ramble about automation is simply the icing on the cake; that's nothing to do with my work, and your needless hypothesising is, well, needless. Ironholds (talk) 19:32, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

That "long ramble", as you put it, is called satire, paying homage to "The Brain Center at Whipple's', as my edit summary referenced. And my observation about your bureaucratic tendencies refers to the film Brazil. You're still taking everything literally, I see. This thread is chock full of the "invisible" people asking for their tools back. I suggest you take a customer service training class, as you aren't very good dealing with real people. Viriditas (talk) 22:36, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose64: So you think the WMF should ignore user needs and do whatever they want. Got it. Hopefully this isn't the new consultative process Jimbo is talking about. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 23:00, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Technolibertarianism will always devolve into outright fascism. You can count on it. "Jünger like Marinetti emphasized the revolutionary capacities of technology, and emphasized an "organic construction" between human and machine as a liberating and regenerative force in that challenged liberal democracy, conceptions of individual autonomy, bourgeois nihilism, and decadence. He conceived of a society based on a totalitarian concept of "total mobilization" of such disciplined warrior-workers." Sounds familiar. Viriditas (talk) 23:59, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

when the checklinks tool work--Amt000 (talk) 02:57, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@NeilN: I said nothing of the sort. I said that Wikimedia Deutschland shut down Toolserver. That is a fact, not an opinion on what the WMF should (or should not) be doing. There is a big difference between an organisation taking away a service that they had previously provided, but which the community found useful, and an organisation not giving us something that they had not previously provided, but which the community does want. That WMF chose to provide an alternative hosting service (well over a year earlier) in the form of Labs is to our benefit, not our loss. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:03, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Interesting how the topic of this discussion has been side-railed and never managed to quite get back on track. For the record, I support the addition of superprotect when used to enforce page locks for official office actions (like the legal team protecting a version of the page for legal reasons), and think that we should use our WP:BLACKLOCK for this protection level in templates and userscripts. Speaking of which, is this change live on enwp someplace and a test page protected with it so I can update my script to include it? Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 14:05, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
- As far as I know, superprotect has only been used to protect one page on any production wiki, ever. It's possible that it is available on one of the test wikis if you'd like to do some testing for you scripts.
  On a slightly related point, if someone would like to figure out what's got screwed up at the Javanese Wikipedia (see File:Screen_Shot_jv.wp_2014-07-04_at_10.16.31_AM.png), that would be helpful. It's probably something about the site notices. I've asked the admins there, and they have no idea how to fix it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:24, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Probably off-topic but as Reflinks is currently down, and the "consider signing the petition" link on its page links to this section, I'll just post this here: Reflinks is absolutely vital and it should be fixed or an adequate replacement found as soon as possible, there is currently no other tool that offers the same amount of functionality as Reflinks does that doesn't involve tediously fixing bare URLs manually to some degree. Satellizer (´ ･ ω ･ `) 12:10, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
I was a bit fed up about this being used to hijack the superprotect discussion, so I've separated them. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 14:35, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
Please restore Reflinks. It is very useful. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 22:56, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Agreed, they need to put their differences aside, and get these tools back up for the sake of Wikipedia. If it never comes back, i can't see myself filling refs again. Koala15 (talk) 23:53, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Please bring Dabsolver back. DuncanHill (talk) 17:40, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
Regardless of the reason why we're at this point without Reflinks and the like, I've concluded that the more WMF gets involved the worse the situation gets. Wikipedia works better when WMF does nothing but collect donations and keep the servers up. Everything else they've done makes the work of editors harder. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:06, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I need reflinks. This is just petty and sad. :(--Coin945 (talk) 19:42, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
Just a note that I made a rewrite of Reflinks on https://tools.wmflabs.org/fengtools/reflinks/ . Anyone interested in giving it a go? Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 09:46, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
- More information: User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 13:22, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
  @User:Zhaofeng Li, it worked on 1) a long elaborate base case, and found there were no changes needed, and on 2) a little article with one citation fixed up. I pasted in the generated update into the little article, and submitted the change. Your Reflinks rewrite looks good, and thank you, --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 13:54, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
  
  Now what should happen to publicize this result. Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs)

I added it to this list [63], which is where I found the old one a long time ago. Perhaps there are other places? Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:17, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Rewrite of Reflinks

Hi folks! I've made a quick-and-dirty rewrite of Reflinks: https://tools.wmflabs.org/fengtools/reflinks/ (Source). ~~It currently doesn't have the XSS editing interface like the original tool, so you'll need to copy-and-paste the generated source back into the article.~~ Could you test it out? Thanks a lot! Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 13:48, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Pinging Zhaofeng Li. Maybe I'm not adept at using this in its present state. I tried it on Hikaru Sulu, specifically on one citation. This was the Result. Or maybe that was correct - I've never done a Twitter ref. — Maile (talk) 20:37, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Here's another: I tried Rodney Alexander as a "Fix Page", and did not save the changes to the page. It looks to me like while it fixed the refs, within the article it also randomly substituted a question mark in place of dashes in dates (1988–2004 to 1988?2004), quotation marks and apostrophes elsewhere. The substitution on apostrophes was not consistent - hit and miss type of thing. — Maile (talk) 20:53, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

@Maile66: I've fixed the display of some Unicode characters. Could you test it again? Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 23:00, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. It worked fine but does not seem to create a |publisher = | field for webcites . Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:04, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@Alanscottwalker: Thanks for trying it out! Basic matadata parsing is now available (work, date, author) for sites with metadata embedded (e.g. Forbes, Engadget, Time, etc).^commit Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 12:38, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the response but I am unclear, are you saying that a publisher won't be included for any site (or only some sites) if not can the program just insert a blank publisher field? Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:45, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@Alanscottwalker: Yes, |publisher= won't be included. There is http://www.schema.org/publisher but I haven't seen it in any site I know, so I haven't written the code to parse it. I can add a blank field for publisher, but I'm not sure if it'll clutter up the source. Maybe leave it to the editors to manually add the field? Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 13:07, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Two points. 1) the old tool generally put something there (it often had to be corrected because it was often just the web address or somewhat less informative site name like, tribune.com), but 2) at least with a blank field it will either remind people that this information is part of the information we want, or may even lead them to actually adding it (now or sometime in the future). (As for clutter, it's my experience that blank field show up in the code but not in the article.) Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:22, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@Alanscottwalker: Okay, an empty |publisher= will be added to the end.^commit Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 13:35, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Crossing my fingers that I have not lead you astray :) Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:48, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Works well, and it actually resolves New York Times urls, which the original never did.--Auric talk 13:39, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Zhaofeng Li, your rewrite works. Thanks. Any chance of getting it into the sidebar toolbox similiar to this one:

// Add WP:Reflinks launcher in the toolbox on left

addOnloadHook(function () {

addPortletLink(

"p-tb", // toolbox portlet

"http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webreflinks.py/" + wgPageName

+ "?client=script&citeweb=on&overwrite=&limit=30&lang=" + wgContentLanguage,

"Reflinks" // link label

)});

— Maile (talk) 14:57, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@Maile66: Yes, just made a script. Add {{subst:iusc|User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks.js}} to your common.js and it'll work. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 15:18, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Zhaofeng Li, many thanks. — Maile (talk) 17:07, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Cool Zhaofeng Li! Will check it out. Really miss Reflinks! →Enock4seth ^(talk) 23:32, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Great! Zhaofeng Li! Works perfectly here! Thanks. →Enock4seth ^(talk) 23:41, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@Zhaofeng Li: Your replacement works very well - thanks for developing this and for being so responsive to feedback on your talk page.

@Enock4seth: You may want to expand the references with |author=, |date= and |publisher=. Happy editing! GoingBatty (talk) 00:28, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@Zhaofeng Li and Enock4seth: Unfortunately, it didn't work perfectly. It appears it added an incorrect |author= in reference #3. GoingBatty (talk) 00:30, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: Oops! Seen it. Thanks for the heads-up! :) →Enock4seth ^(talk) 10:17, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for creating this Zhaofeng Li, it seems to work so far. I have a question for anyone who can answer it. Is there some logic to the choice of date formats? I ask because Dispenser's Reflinks used YYYY-MM-DD, and Zhaofeng Li's uses DD MMM YYYY? ProveIt follows user preferences.- Mr X 01:03, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

WP:STRONGNAT says articles with strong national ties should use the most common date format in the country, hence the use of {{Use dmy dates}} and {{Use mdy dates}}. I'll update the tool to detect such templates and use the corresponding date format, or fall back to user preference if none is found. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 07:32, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Just a note that it now detects the templates for preferred date format. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 14:25, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, I will give it try.- Mr X 22:18, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

The date format is being picked up from user prefs now, but I think there may be a problem with some of the parsing. Several refs are filled with "date=January 1, 1970". Some of the authors are not being picked up correctly, and there are some issues with the some titles. See this diff which you can compare to Dispenser's reflinks here.- Mr X 22:46, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

For clarification, it doesn't follow user preferences here (It has no way to know your on-wiki preferences, anyway), only the templates. By default, it uses the DMY format (e.g. 1 January 1970), but it switches to MDY (e.g. January 1, 1970) when {{Use mdy dates}} is used (in the example given above). Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 09:13, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

@MrX: Didn't see the "1970" error. It was a bug and is now fixed. Thanks. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 04:25, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Zhaofeng Li the dates work great now. In the cases where there us no {{use mdy dates}} or {{use dmy dates}} it may be a good idea to try to determine the citation date format already in use per MOS:DATEUNIFY.- Mr X 22:30, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Just a heads-up that diff preview is available on the result page. Give it a try. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 07:34, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Is there a reason why the diff display is a fixed width (apparently based on the monospace font in use by the browser) rather than responsive to the browser window width?- Mr X 22:30, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

PLEASE restore Dispenser's tools, including Reflinks. There is no good reason to rewrite any of them from scratch. — Lentower (talk) 10:44, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
- Actually, it has already been done (somehow). Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 12:26, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
  - To make my point clear: Yes, there is good reason to rewrite Reflinks. To my understanding, it's either a) the original Reflinks incorporates code with unclear licensing, or b) Dispenser is simply unwilling to open-source the original Reflinks (unless his financial requirement is met). So in my opinion, rewriting Reflinks from scratch is the best way to avoid more dramas in our community. By the way, I find Coren's action here perfectly reasonable, since he's acting according to Labs Terms of Use. Wikipedia is free, and its tools should be free too, with as few strings attached as possible. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 04:53, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
    - The original Reflinks is GPL'd; its my library that needs to be audited. That "financial requirement" was to use 24 TB of storage already purchased, unused, and no plans for any use.
      Coren has literally changed rules (with dubious justification) to hinder me. I had already removed the non-free software in question and was composing an email to legal requesting permission to use non-free software (Yes, Labs has non-FLOSS) when Coren banned and kicked me. — Dispenser 04:58, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Just tried the new version here, seems to have worked perfectly. I had to put importScript("User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks.js"); //Linkback: [[User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks.js]] on my common.js. Thanks again, Zhaofeng Li! —ATinySliver/^ATalkPage 18:48, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

@Zhaofeng Li: - Howdy! Would you like some design help on this? I'm more than willing to help, and I've cleared it so that I can give you some time, if you'd like. You can hit me up on my user page or email me directly (bharris -at- wikimedia.org). --Jorm (WMF) (talk) 01:04, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

@Jorm (WMF): Thanks a lot! Will certainly do. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 02:06, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

@ATinySliver and Zhaofeng Li: Unfortunately, it didn't work perfectly here, so I reverted the edit.

Reflinks replaced a valid dead link tag with an incorrect reference to Yahoo.
Reflinks added "North JC Neighborhood Association" in the work parameter
Reflinks added "Oakmont Village www.oakmontvillage.com" in the author parameter
Reflinks added "Forbes.com" in the title parameter instead of the title of the article
ATinySliver didn't make the necessary corrections before saving the edit.

Zhaofeng Li has done a fabulous job and is working hard to improve the tool, but it will always need humans to double check it and make fixes before saving. GoingBatty (talk) 02:22, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Guh! Frak! —ATinySliver/^ATalkPage 02:59, 10 September 2014

@GoingBatty: It now skips references with dead link tags silently. The other problems will be dealt later, since it's so awkward to type with the touchscreen on my phone. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 04:50, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Reply - Thank you for creating the new version of Reflinks! --Jax 0677 (talk) 04:59, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

You don't actually have to fix before saving but if you don't, you should fix after saving. That's also double checking. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:18, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, that was just an unfortunate case of me paying insufficient attention. I've used it since with greater care. xD —ATinySliver/^ATalkPage 18:10, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Part of the problem is the insistence on open-sourced software. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a political movement. Demanding people only run free software, oppose "right to forget" and join Amnesty International are al outwith the Foundation's remit. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:31, 11 September 2014 (UTC).
- The board disagrees with you about free software. The "right to forget" is basically censorship in removing reference to true information because someone wants to hide from their past, and censorship isn't something the board supports either. I haven't heard anything about WMF and Amnesty International. Anomie⚔ 13:16, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
  - The connection is probably that the keynote speaker at the recent Wikimania was Salil Shetty — secretary-general of Amnesty International. He was quite a good speaker and made some interesting parallels between his organisation and ours. He is leading a major restructuring of that organisation which is causing lots of internal strife. You can see his speech here. Andrew (talk) 14:31, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

The board does not disagree with me.

Nowhere does it try to compel people outside the foundation to use free software or to release their software under free licenses.
And "right to be forgotten" has no impact on the content of any of the projects I am involved with, it applies only to "outdated, irrelevant or wrong" information, and our BLP requirements are much stricter. Besides which the text you refer to says "Except where required by applicable law" so accepts things like "right to be forgotten".

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:44, 17 September 2014 (UTC).

You forget that Tool Labs is hosted by the Foundation. People who want to use non-free software are welcome to host their tools elsewhere. And the "except where required by applicable law" isn't saying they support censorship just because some government makes a law, it says they'll comply with the law despite objecting to the censorship. Anomie ⚔ 12:41, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Why do you think I am forgetting that? Clearly one cannot go elsewhere, since WMF have effectively closed down the toolserver, and now want to ensure that they potentially retain control of the tools. This hegemony is actually anti-freedom, and attempts to make forking impossible. As Lila said on Meta "We need to figure out why people aren't hosting here." WMF as a hosting company, getting the most hits, not as a foundation supporting the promulgation of free knowledge. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:17, 27 September 2014 (UTC).

Because you claimed that the Board saying that WMF should use free software somehow doesn't apply to Tool Labs. Your paranoid claims about "retaining control" and "attempts to make forking impossible" are just that. Most people find it much easier to fork code when it's under an open-source license. Anomie ⚔ 20:18, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Very nice version of reflinks, but one glitch i noticed was it doesn't add a ref name= when multiple refs are the same. Koala15 (talk) 16:12, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
Yeah, it doesn't merge duplicated references. There are other scripts that can do this, anyway. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 11:09, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
BG19bot (talk · contribs) merges duplicated refs. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:03, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Kudos for the rewrite. When converting refs not using cite, e.g. this ref: <ref>[http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/02/mom_blames_luzerne_county_judg.html Mom blames son's suicide on Luzerne County judge in 'kids for cash' case]. Associated Press. February 22, 2011</ref>, it's losing both the date and publisher, even though this information is both on the source website and in the replaced reference. It would be cool if it could parse one or both of these metadata sources.

Also, it's wanting to add "accessdate=17 September 2014"; I thought that was a bug, but then realized it makes sense, as the tool has been to the site and confirmed that it's still live.

Lastly, it would be cool if it could parse the archiveurl field in order to fill in the archivedate field. However, perhaps its more appropriate for the citation template to simply parse the field itself.

--{{U|Elvey}} ^(t•c) 03:04, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

The |accessdate= should not be automatically changed under those circumstances. The |accessdate= indicates the date on which it is known the reference supports the text, not just that there is a webpage at that address. It is unlikely that the tool has the capability to determine that the webpage has not changed from the time that it was cited. Without verifying that the webpage still supports the text, the |accessdate= should not be changed. The entire purpose of |accessdate= is to give us the date when the webpage supported the text, not just when there was a server that happened to provide content for that URL. — Makyen (talk) 04:46, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

@Elvey and Makyen: It doesn't parse metadata from plain references, only the caption. Expanding of those references can be disabled by selecting "Do not expand captioned plain links" (Should this be made default?) Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 12:53, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

On an unrelated note, New York Times is now blacklisted since it's only spitting the log-in page back to us (We have only 10 free articles per month). Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 12:57, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Why would you blacklist it? Only recent articles count in the 10 free per month. Koala15 (talk) 01:02, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Will investigate into it. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 00:25, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Nice work, Zhaofeng.

Is there now enough confidence in the rewrite that the link (now hidden) to the old Reflinks in {{Cleanup-bare URLs}} could be replaced with a link to the new version?—Quick and Dirty User Account (talk) 20:52, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

@Quick and Dirty User Account: It's almost ready, but I'd like to have the outstanding bugs fixed before it's added. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 00:25, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I've started a new section on Template talk:Cleanup-bare URLs#Reflinks rewrite to discuss this. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 15:07, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

I've added the tool and updated the documentation. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 09:57, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

List of templates

Wikipedia:TemplateData#Used in main-space (>5000 uses) appears to be nearly empty, but a lot of somewhat common templates (including many CS1 citation templates) still don't have any TemplateData. Could someone make a list of commonly used templates that have no TemplateData blocks (either of the /doc subpage or in the Template itself)? There have been several volunteers working on that task, and they've asked for an updated list several times in the past year.

Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Wrapping signatures with a SPAN for discoverability

See:

Helder 21:30, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

- Also see: Bugzilla:25141. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 23:49, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

What clobbered the CirrusSearch index?

I searched for "largest obesity prevention network" just now and got 10 hits. All of these articles were edited by me earlier today, but most of the last edited dates now shown by CirrusSearch are much older. A few hours ago I made the same search and all 10 articles showed today's date! The real killer is that when you go back to LuceneSearch, it shows a date of 29 September 2014 for article "John Hill (Australian politician)", while CirrusSearch shows a date of 27 August 2014; it doesn't even see the edit made to it yesterday! A major selling point for CirrusSearch is that it is supposed to reflect changes almost immediately, without waiting for a daily index update. Now it's worse than LuceneSearch's index, which the search team had officially given up for dead until 6 days ago, but its index is now being updated more or less on a daily basis. I just did a null edit to the "Bariatrics" article, and now CirrusSearch sees the latest edit, so it looks like CirrusSearch's index will eventually recover, after every article in Wikipedia that was edited over the last day or two has been edited again (shouldn't take much more than a year or two). I think I need a drink. Chris the speller ^yack 03:28, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Why does starting a line with a space resulted in preformatted text?

So when I start a line with a space...

The result is this preformatted text, which worst of all, doesn't word wrap, and then puts a horizontal scroll bar on the entire page because of a single confused new user

What a new editor would expect is...

This line of text, which is indented. However, this line actually starts with a colon.

Why do we do this? What good does it do to confuse the hell out of new editors? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 00:09, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Just because....? By design it was meant as an EASY way to display preformed text. I think it has outlived its usefulness as the use cases for adding preformated text by people who dont' really mean it and know about the <pre> tags is very small. Almost everytime I see it, it is an error. As far as converting wiki-markup to html goes, I disagree that leading spaces should be automatically converted to non-breaking spaces. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:47, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not necessarily saying what type of space or tab it should be, I'm saying a leading space should appear as a space. An ordinary space is probably best, but a colon is the closest thing to that that I know how to do. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 01:56, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

In HTML, multiple whitespaces characters in a row are effectively reduced to a single space. Even linebreaks are usually not preserved. Normal wikitext preserves this, with the slight difference that (in most contexts) a double linebreak is transformed into a paragraph break.

Since wikitext is in origin basically plain text with ad-hoc markup along the lines of that used in plain-text email and other media, indenting a line with spaces was taken as an indication that the writer intended the line to display with spacing and newlines intact and with a monospaced font, exactly the default formatting for a <pre>. This seems to be relatively common in other tools that take plain text as input and output it wrapped nicely in HTML, although whether wikitext is due to that or vice versa I don't know. Anomie ⚔ 11:06, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

That's a good technical explanation. The problem is that I've never seen an instance of a single space being used with that purpose in mind, but I've seen an awful lot of instances of it happening when it wasn't wanted. HiLo48 (talk) 11:28, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I suspect this is one of those things where it may be too late to fix it. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 11:37, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Part of the technical problem when inventing a markup language whose output is primarily intended to be displayed by a web browser is that HTML doesn't actually have a semantic way to specify indented or column-aligned (non-tabular) text. (The "colon" MediaWiki markup is mapped to HTML's "description definition" element, which is supposed to follow a "description term" element (which in MediaWiki markup is represented by an initial semi-colon). <dd> elements are typically indented when rendered, which is why initial colons are used to produce indent levels, even though semantically it's incorrect.) So mapping initial spaces to a pre-formatted block rendered using a fixed-width font provides a way to quickly include text that is manually column-aligned. This is useful for including coding examples, for instance, but less useful for a general purpose encyclopedia. isaacl (talk) 00:24, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Proposal: A wikitext line beginning with spaces should be formatted as a printed line beginning with a space

The proposal to change the software formatting is pretty straightforward. The formatting would explicitly show only a single space, and not multiple, regardless of how many spaces are typed by the user. Please comment whether you approve. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 19:18, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Oppose the proposal as formulated as there has been no consideration of what will break as a consequence. And as Adam Cuerden said, this may be one of those things that it is too late to fix. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:44, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not clear what you mean by "a single space": from your previous example, I think you mean a single indent level? To be honest, if we were going to change this behaviour to something else, I'm not sure this is the formatting I'd choose. For better or worse, though, the effort to transition existing text to use a new mechanism and educate editors on the change would probably not produce enough benefit to make it worthwhile. isaacl (talk) 22:50, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Is anybody actually using this as a feature? I think everytime I've ever seen this, it's been an error by a new editor. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 23:42, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Of course, for example in many articles about computer science and algorithms, like Dijkstra's algorithm. Also, as a general rule, whenever there is a certain behavior of wikitext, whether intended or not, whether well-defined or not, somebody, somewhere, is using it as a feature, and will come shout at you if you change it. Matma Rex talk 00:15, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I often use it to display code like in #Below editing window. Sieve of Eratosthenes#Example shows use in an article. It's part of the MediaWiki software used by thousands of wikis. Some of them probably use it much more than us. It would cause confusion if a new MediaWiki version changed it, or introduced an option where wikis could choose another interpretation of leading spaces. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:16, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Not sure if you've noticed, but the current behaviour already causes confusion. Hence this proposal. HiLo48 (talk) 08:39, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

To make this happen:

File a feature request
Identify and update all current intentional uses to <pre>
Wait until a developer implements this

Gadget850^talk 00:28, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

It's extremely unlikely that MediaWiki would be changed for this usage, but anyone wanting that would also need to consider that <pre> disables wikitext markup like using apostrophes for bold or braces for templates or making links clickable. Starting a line with a space is different and someone will be using that fact somewhere. Johnuniq (talk) 02:14, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Oppose It's an established and documented feature of the MediaWiki markup that has been there almost from the start (the earliest reference to this feature that I can find is in the release notes for MediaWiki 1.3.4 (28 September 2004) which includes a bugfix "Strip leading blank from output in preformated text."). Remember that MediaWiki is used on many projects and websites, not just Wikipedia; it is far, far too late to change this behaviour now. Eleven years ago (MediaWiki 1.1 arrived in December 2003), maybe; but not now. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:22, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
Documented? LOL. It's our novice users who get stung by this behaviour. Tell me the chances they will see this alleged documentation before getting totally confused. HiLo48 (talk) 08:39, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
Help:Wiki markup#Retaining newlines and spaces "The MediaWiki software suppresses single newlines and converts lines starting with a space to preformatted text in a dashed box." --Redrose64 (talk) 09:15, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
Quoting the documentation here is not a sensible response to my concerns. HiLo48 (talk) 11:36, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
When I started editing Wikipedia, the page that was then called Wikipedia:How to edit a page included this section. It's not there any more: along with some other sections, it was moved on 4 December 2009 to a new page, Help:Wiki markup, where it remains, see Help:Wiki markup#Limiting formatting / escaping wiki markup. That table has been amended since then, primarily to exchange the two columns and insert a row; but the bottom row, about leading spaces, has substantially the same meaning as it did back in May 2009. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:06, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I for one, when I began editing at the beginning of this year, knew of this from the start, because I read the Help pages. BethNaught (talk) 16:10, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
That's very wise. Being so wise, you will also know that most new editors won't read the Help pages before they start editing. I think our aim should be to keep both kinds of editors here. HiLo48 (talk) 21:28, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Support It's the obvious expected behaviour. Those saying it's too late too fix it remind me of the farming spokesman here in Australia who once declared "This rain is nice, but it's too late to break the drought." Just fix it. HiLo48 (talk) 08:35, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
Oppose: This will break stuff. I know people do actually use it because I sometimes use it to format my talk page. I don't want to have to go fix up my archives, thank you. Other users have identified mainspace uses as well. This is too late to fix, unless you like breaking stuff ~~for the sake of it~~. BethNaught (talk) 09:05, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

That's a rude comment. I want it fixed, not because I "like breaking stuff for the sake of it", but so we can retain new editors, those who get put off Wikipedia forever by the completely confusing, non-intuitive behaviour of our user interface. Nobody is asking for this just for the sake of it. They are asking for it because they care. HiLo48 (talk) 11:36, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I realise you had a reason and shouldn't have ignored that. I am curious to know however how this will be changed without causing damage. In my opinion, we should retain this behaviour as a useful if idiosyncratic MediaWiki feature and expedite the improvement and return of VisualEditor, which will have a much greater positive effect on newcomer retention than changing one small part of a markup language. BethNaught (talk) 12:05, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, if a high quality version of Visual Editor was delivered, via a process using even higher quality change management (something sorely missing last time), there would be no issue. HiLo48 (talk) 21:34, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Oppose If this is to be changed, leading spaces should just be stripped. In practice bad copy paste often introduces these, the <pre> behavior makes them pretty obvious to see right now, but converting them to   is not desirable either. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:52, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
Just saw your note above, the conversion to a non-breaking space would be needed over a normal space, as a leading normal space would get removed as part of the generic html cleanup. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:06, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Oppose It is already being used as a feature now. --Fauzan^{✆ talk}_{✉ mail} 12:44, 27 September 2014 (UTC)
Oppose per above. ansh666 18:05, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Many deprecated JavaScript methods will be removed from MediaWiki next week

This was in the Tech News announcement just above this, but I thought it could do with a little more publicity. The following JavaScript methods and parameters will be removed from MediaWiki 1.25, which means that they will no longer be available on Wikipedia after 9 October:

mw.user.name() method.
mw.user.anon() method.
mediawiki.api methods' "ok" and "err" callback parameters.
mediawiki.api.category "async" parameter.
jquery.json module.

See the announcement on Wikitech-ambassadors for more details and for alternative code.

A few searches revealed some of this code is still in use on this wiki. @Shirki, Tog000, Thomas.tarak.mathew, OrenBochman, Hydriz, and Future Perfect at Sunrise: Your names came up in a search for mw.user.name. @PerfektesChaos: Your name came up in a search for jquery.json. My own JavaScript skills are still rather rudimentary, but if you have any questions about how to update your code I'm sure others on this noticeboard will be willing to help. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 10:29, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

A lot of scripts were cleaned up a couple of months ago, but it would be good to have these remaining ones addressed.

We need a template that says something like All your scripts are going to break! for critical announcements.

Also, for those of you who are active at other projects (other languages and/or non-Wikipedias, please spread the word. This has been announced repeatedly for months, but it's still going to catch some people by surprise. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

I've notified en.Wiktionary, though it doesn't seem to use any of the above-mentioned things. -sche (talk) 18:12, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for reminding me.

One remark wrt WMF, since Whatamidoing (WMF) contributed to this section:

Internet Explorer 7 support has been discontinued mid of September (1.24wmf21).
- jquery.json has been needed to polyfill the lack of JSON here.
Less than one month later all scripts are forced to migrate from jquery.json to JSON.stringify() only, announced on Sep 20 23:55:18 -- to be executed within two weeks, otherwise they shall break.
It would not have done any harm to keep jquery.json as a one-liner .toJSON(o) { return JSON.stringify(o); } for half a year.

Greetings --PerfektesChaos (talk) 20:03, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Category:Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows - how does an article get into this category?

I came across this hidden category when editing New Hope & Ivyland 40. The article uses Infobox locomotive and the contents seem similar to many other locomotive pages. The category page gives no information on the reasons why an article is in the category. I checked the talk page and found that someone else had asked the same question, and a reply suggested that the question had been answered (but without a link to the answer...). A further response stated that this forum may the best place for an answer. I've checked the archive but still can't find an answer.

The wording of the category name suggests that its for empty infoboxes, and looking at some of the (12,000+) pages suggests this might be true, but some others (eg Abergavenny Hundred) are populated with parameter values. Robevans123 (talk) 09:55, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

@Robevans123: In the case of New Hope & Ivyland 40 it's an empty {{external media}}; I removed it and the page is no longer in Category:Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows.

In the case of Abergavenny Hundred it's because Template:Infobox historic subdivision has several "child" infoboxes, and if any one of those is fed no data, the whole page ends up in Category:Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:38, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

I have posted to Template talk:Infobox#Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows about this "child" issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:05, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Thanks for the explanations and cleanup. I'd seen {{external media}} but had assumed it was not an infobox. After your post I went and had a look at it. It's not obvious that it is an infobox, although the examples at the end of a page give a bit of a clue. I only found out that it was an infobox by looking at the source to find that it used {{infobox}}.

@PrimeHunter: Thanks for posting to Template talk:Infobox#Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows. I'll add to that discussion shortly about infoboxes that don't say that they are infoboxes (such as {{external media}}).

In the meantime, I'll add some notes to Category:Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows to explain what it does and why it isn't always obvious what the problem is.

I'm also going to add something to the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization as the whole area of tracking and maintenance categories seems a bit messy and inconsistent. Robevans123 (talk) 13:35, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Added brief description to Category:Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows. Robevans123 (talk) 14:19, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

I ended up here after noticing the cat in 2014 Isla Vista killings. I still don't know how to uncat it. There are two infoboxes, civilian attack and criminal. If there are unused children, it's because they aren't needed. How to fix? ‑‑Mandruss (talk) 19:35, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I missed the template talk. Ignoring the cat for now. ‑‑Mandruss (talk) 19:42, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

@Mandruss: At the moment, the only really safe way is to wrap the child infobox in code that ensures that it only appears if there is data to put in it, like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:29, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Just a tad over my pay grade, Rose. Are you suggesting a copy of the template local to the article, somehow? ‑‑Mandruss (talk) 20:36, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Not the article, the template. If the edit that I made to Template:Infobox criminal/sandbox (the template's sandbox) is made to Template:Infobox criminal (the live template), pages like 2014 Isla Vista killings will drop out of Category:Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows in a few hours. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:45, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Ok, well feel free to do that with my blessing lol. ‑‑Mandruss (talk) 20:58, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

textarea lang="en" is screwing up Internet Explorer

DuncanHill (talk · contribs) reported on the Reference Desk that Internet Explorer is enforcing US English spelling in Wikipedia's edit boxes, even though he selected the UK English dictionary, and that it doesn't happen on other web sites. I was able to reproduce the problem with IE 11 on Windows 7 (US English version). The problem is that IE seems to interpret lang="en" as equivalent to lang="en-US", at least on US English Windows.

I think this is a bug in IE, not MediaWiki, but is there any way to work around it on the MediaWiki end? -- BenRG (talk) 21:03, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

So the problem isn't with the system messages that are being displayed, but with the autocorrect in the spelling checker?

I wonder what language User:DuncanHill has selected in Special:Preferences, and if changing that would have any effect (I kind of doubt it, but it'd be easy to find out). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:57, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I have British English selected in preferences. I always select British English whenever and wherever I have the chance. DuncanHill (talk) 02:59, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I tried changing my interface language to en-GB and ja (it's normally en) and the textarea is still tagged lang="en" in both cases, which I suppose makes sense since that's the language of the wiki. I suppose MW could use the user's language preference or the Accept-Language header instead of the wiki language if it's more precise than the wiki language (so en-GB preference → en-GB textarea, but ja preference → en textarea). I have no idea how hard it would be to implement that or whether it's actually a good idea. -- BenRG (talk) 07:05, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

How to get PAGENAME of template instead of page on which it's transcluded

I have a template called Foo:MyTemplate, containing

Hello from {{PAGENAME}}

I have a page called MyPage, containing

{{Foo:MyTemplate}}

It renders as

Hello from MyPage

I want it to render, instead,

Hello from MyTemplate

That is, I want a variable that gives me the name of the "innermost" page it comes from, not any "outer" pages on which it gets transcluded. It seems that currently, all the transclusion of pages takes place before the evaluation of {{PAGENAME}} – I want a variable that is evaluated last instead. One obvious application is error messages containing the name of the template that issued them without having to hardcode that name in the message (and the resulting chance a rename/move occurs without changing it). Any ideas? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 02:22, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

@AlanM1: {{#invoke:TEMPLATENAME|main}}. Note that you can't build a wrapper template around that module; if you did, it would say the wrapper template's name instead of the name you wanted. Also, if you have a template that complicated, you're probably better off writing the whole thing in Lua. Jackmcbarn (talk) 02:32, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

@Jackmcbarn: Thanks! Works great. I'm not sure if I understood your wrapper comment, though. I modified the scenario to:

I have a template called Foo:MyTemplate, containing

Hello from {{#invoke:TEMPLATENAME|main}}

I have a template called Foo:MyWrapper, containing

{{#invoke:TEMPLATENAME|main}} says {{Foo:MyTemplate}}

I have a page called MyPage, containing

{{Foo:MyWrapper}}

It renders as intended:

MyWrapper says Hello from MyTemplate

—[AlanM1(talk)]— 03:46, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I may have been a bit unclear in my description. What you saw there is what I meant would happen. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:57, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Issue with Template:CrunchBase

Hey all - this is in regards to Template:CrunchBase. At the moment, placing {{Crunchbase person}} on an article will create a link to the respective CrunchBase profile using the PAGENAME through urlencode. This will, for example, turn Steve Jobs into steve+jobs. The problem with this is that CrunchBase's URL system uses - instead of + to represent spaces, making all these URLs broken (e.g. steve+jobs should be steve-jobs). I can't figure out a way to render the page name with dashes instead of spaces - any help? Thanks! ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 08:13, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I used {{Replace}} in [64]. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Ah, simple enough - thanks! :) ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 16:54, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Back button broken after page creation

Matma Rex Further to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 130#Back button broken after page restore, I've now had something similar happen when creating a page (specifically, Category:Draft-Class rail transport articles) by clicking a redlink. Essentially, what I did was to click a redlink; enter the appropriate wikicode (copied from elsewhere with small adjustments); save the page; click on some bluelinks in the newly-created page. The normal "back" operation will not take me back any further than Category:Draft-Class rail transport articles, the newly-created page, but again, a right-click to get the tab history works. Browser is now Firefox 32.0.3 --Redrose64 (talk) 13:00, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose64: This time it has nothing to do with wikitext redirects, right? :) Perhaps it's a new Firefox bug? You indeed do get a HTTP redirect after saving the page (from /w/index.php, which is where the edit form is submitted to, to the article page), but it has been this way since ever. Matma Rex talk 20:40, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikilink showing up as markup?

Does anyone know what's going on with the link to ball milling in the Carbon Nanoscrolls article? For me it seems to be showing up in the article with literal brackets "[[" rather than as a link. (I'm on Internet Explorer, which I'm not usually, but it's a new version so even if that's the issue we should probably be compatible) ∴ ZX95 ^[discuss] 14:10, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

@ZX95: Fixed. The problem was that there was a line break inside the link. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:14, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

@Jackmcbarn: Looks good. Thanks! :) ∴ ZX95 ^[discuss] 14:27, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Watchlist question

If you have a topic or subject you're following on a noticeboard, Talk page, or discussion forum is there a way to isolate your Watchlist to list only responses to the topic you're interested in (perhaps a url#subjectname), or do you have to receive all posts and sort through to find your topic? Atsme☯^Consult 20:06, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

At the moment that's not possible (unless the topic is actually on it's own subpage), but it will be once Flow is ready. — HHHIPPO 20:17, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

You can also check "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" option under the "Recent changes" tab of your preferences, which will let you expand a list of all changes since your last visit on your watchlist and see if the particular section you are interested in has been edited.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 30, 2014; 20:30 (UTC)

Thank you! Atsme☯^Consult 22:09, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Once Flow is ready Consider applying at the comedy club, because that one was pretty good. KonveyorBelt 22:40, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I've could prototype a section watchlist in a few hours (Already did some tests demonstrating feasibility), but some WMFers been harassing me and banned me from Labs. — Dispenser 16:41, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Internal error

I was getting internal errors just now when trying to access pages such as Special:Contributions/Jimbo_Wales or when editing this section to tell you about it. A sample error message: "[fde6768c] 2014-10-01 20:18:23: Fatal exception of type Scribunto_LuaInterpreterNotFoundError". I've never seen anything like this before. Andrew (talk) 20:30, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

This was a temporary server-side glitch that's since been fixed. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:21, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Did Wikipedia just burp?

Suddenly everything on my watch list disappeared and my contributions only showed a selection of my last edits. So I logged out and logged back in...now my contributions are missing a great deal of the work I just did. Odd.--Mark Miller (talk) 22:19, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

And I see why...for some reason, my contributions at Palace Hotel, San Francisco are listed as my old user name User:Amadscientist. Hmmmmm. I wonder if this is about my global account settings and a request at commons to change my name? Let me check out a few things.--Mark Miller (talk) 22:24, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Ok...its doing it again. Logging out for a while. If anyone can look into this it would be nice.--Amadscientist (talk) 22:26, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

In fact...it looks like my username has been returned to Amadscientist. I have no idea what is going on but..I am logging out for a while to see if the gremlins and bugs get sorted out.--Amadscientist (talk) 22:29, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm me again. Don't know how long it will last.--Mark Miller (talk) 22:55, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

You're a mad scientist, you figure it out.--v/r - T P 23:19, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I have done what every good mad scientist has done. I have created a monster. But if the mob comes after me with pitch forks and torches....that will be very sad. Uhm thanks? (I guess)--Mark Miller (talk) 23:37, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

VE Special characters

I just tried to insert the Greek alphabet into the VE special characters interface page with this edit. That seemed to break the special characters function so I reverted the edit. I can't figure out what was wrong with it though. SpinningSpark 01:25, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Missing commas (on all but the last element). —[AlanM1(talk)]— 02:14, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Awesome. SpinningSpark 07:04, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Maybe that page needs an edit notice aout the incredibly brittle formatting. A single typo will cause it to ignore the whole page amf give you the default.

The whole thing needs to be redesigned, but I don't know when that will happen. Once they've got a good design, I should ask them to make a GUI editor for it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:52, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

How to create non-modal (modeless) message window

When you save an edit successfully, a small popup modeless (non-modal) window with rounded corners appears saying something like "Your edits have been saved", and it disappears after a few seconds. Can I create these from a user script (e.g. in Javascript)? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 02:07, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

@AlanM1: That particular dialog is "special" and can't be easily replicated, but you can show little popup windows like the one that appears after watchlisting a page using mw.notify('Message text'). Matma Rex talk 08:11, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Active watchers

The page information page (query parameter &action=info) provides the number of watchers. Is this all watchers or just active watchers (watchers with edit activity during the previous 30 days)? If the former is the case, I suggest adding a new watcher count excluding watchers without edit activity during the previous 30 days. Iceblock (talk) 03:45, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

That count includes all watchers. Graham87 07:35, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, Graham87. Is this the right place to propose technical matters, like adding a active watcher count? Iceblock (talk) 07:41, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Bug 49506. It was on Toolserver, but considering how well they botched the transition I'd only expect it in MediaWiki in the 2015-2017 timeline. — Dispenser 16:11, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

changing a title

I made a new article Swenson Technology, but for some reason the title isn't capitalized. How can I change this? I'm not trying to move the page or anything, I'm just trying to make it look right. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mk2788 (talk • contribs) 18:55, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Article is Swenson technology and was marked as a copyvio by CorenSearchBot (talk · contribs). I've had a look, and whole sections have been copied from http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Swenson-Technology,-Inc.-1 with little change (e.g. changing "We specialize" to "The company specializes").

Anyway, to alter the capitalisation of the word "technology", it is necessary to WP:MOVE the page. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:38, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

AfD participation tracker tool by Scotty Wong and Sigma

Has anyone else noticed that the AfD participation tracker tool has ceased to function in the last day or so? Does anyone know anything about this? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 13:00, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Special:RandomInCategory

Special:RandomInCategory doesn't seem to give very random results. This seems to be acknowledged at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Random_In_Category. Although we're running MW 1.25 here, Special:RandomPageInCategory doesn't exist here. What gives? I ask because there have been complaints about this at AfC. ~KvnG 14:22, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Using Stiki for the first time

I know this is very trivial, but I am using both WP:Stiki and VP for the first time, so sorry. I have downloaded the Stiki zip file and unzipped it. On trying to open the jar file, windows is asking me which program I want to use. If I have winrar installed, it is using winrar by default, which is of course the wrong program. Little help? Jayakumar RG (talk) 19:05, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Dunno anything about STiki but .jar is a java file. So you'd need Java installed to run it. Protonk (talk) 20:12, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Running smoothly now, thanks Jayakumar RG (talk) 20:23, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Special function for special page

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T73633

The special page preview of expanded templates does not show the categories a template would place the page into when testing the effect of different parser functions a template might use. Often, the end product of categorization is critical to the templates intended functionality. If the preview would display the categorization array of the syntax being tested, I believe the usefulness of that special page would be increased. Is this an improvement that could be accomplished without excessive difficulty, or perhaps a thing that shouldn't be done? Thank you for considering this.—John Cline (talk) 16:08, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

I've opened bugzilla:71633 about this. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 01:25, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

My fix for this has been merged. It will be live here on October 16th. Jackmcbarn (talk) 02:45, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for this incredibly fast response.—John Cline (talk) 02:57, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

about IP125.191.227.96

I don't know where to put this question in English wikipedia, if this is not the correct place, please remove it. IP125.191.227.96 frequenly change the height of skyscraper into false, the data of 400 George Street hasn't been revised yet, I am not sure if there are more incorrect data changed by this guy. Please help check them, I cannot do that efficiently as I am not a roallbacker.--淺藍雪^❉ 20:20, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

All dealt with, primarily by Makyen and myself. In future, a better place for a request like this would be the administrators' noticeboard. Graham87 07:09, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

@淺藍雪: Thank you for bringing this to the attention of other people. Unfortunately, in this type of situation (vandalism of a nature not obvious on its face and/or subsequent edits), there is no quick and easy solution. It appeared all but the first couple of edits by the IP were intentionally erroneous. In this instance, WP:rollback was actually not the appropriate tool. Had the edits been caught much closer to the September 7/8 date when they were first made, it might have been appropriate. Rollback only functions on the most recent edits to a page and there were multiple pages which had subsequent edits. Further, rollback is to only be used in situations where the edits are uncontroversially vandalism due to not permitting you to provide an edit summary, or in situations where you can provide an explanation in some other place (e.g. the talk page of the user or article). If it had been close to the time when the edits were made, or the vandalism was ongoing, then the urgency might have justified using rollback and providing an explanation elsewhere and the lack of subsequent edits would have made it possible.

In this case, my opinion was that it was much more appropriate to primarily use WP:Twinkle and the ability to provide an edit summary which its rollback option provides. WP:Twinkle is available without the need for the rollback right and can be enabled from the Gadgets page of user preferences. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the edits and the subsequent edits by other editors, it was necessary to investigate the history of most of the articles to see if the edits had remained in the page through subsequent edits. In a couple of cases it was necessary to use the WP:UNDO function to preserve subsequent edits. In a number of articles, the edits had been reverted by other editors. This investigation is made easier by the use of the Naviagtion popups gadget which, among other things, allows you to hover your mouse over the history link on the user's contribution page and see if the subsequent edits are stated as direct reversions of the edits. If not, it is necessary to investigate further to determine if the erroneous information remains on the page.

Unfortunately, the other editors only reverted the changes on the particular page in which they encountered a problem without checking on other edits by the same IP. In general, I have found that if an IP editor is making problematic edits to one page, then it is a good idea to check the IP editors contribution history as there is a strong likelihood that they are making such changes to multiple articles. This is particularly necessary when the edits are not immediately identifiable as vandalism on their face.

If you encounter this situation when the vandalism is ongoing, or relatively near in the past you should add a noted to the user's talk page which provides an explanation as to why the edits are inappropriate and begin the process of posting user warnings. For instance, I have the following text as one of the entries in my permanent clip-set:

{{subst:welcome-anon}} ~~~~

=={{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}==

{{subst:uw-v1|}} ~~~~

This allows me to quickly drop the template onto the page with just the need to fill in the relavent page(s), change the user warning to the one appropriate for the type of issue, and add any further appropriate explanation. WP:Twinkle also allows you to set up templated text for use in some situations. If the editor continues to make inappropriate edits after the level four warning has been issued, then they can be reported at Administrator intervention against vandalism which is specifically for reporting ongoing, obvious vandalism. — Makyen (talk) 17:17, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Name that template

Can anybody work out what the template at the top of User:Mattsenate/The Network of Global Corporate Control is supposed to be? At the moment the template name is set to {{header}}, but that redirects to {{redirect}}, and because the parameters are wrong it is appearing in Category:Hatnote templates with errors. (Same with several other pages in that category.) From an enterprising Google search it looked like the template might be s:Template:Header, but I couldn't find an equivalent of that here on enwiki. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 12:03, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

All I can determine is that the page is a copy of http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025995. Marked as a copyvio. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:40, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

That page says: "Copyright: © 2011 Vitali et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited."

The code of User:Mattsenate/The Network of Global Corporate Control looked very similar to s:Wikisource:WikiProject Open Access/Programmatic import from PubMed Central/The Network of Global Corporate Control which was created later by s:User:Recitation-bot. It uses s:Template:Header-wpoa which uses s:Template:Header. If the {{header}} code is restored at User:Mattsenate/The Network of Global Corporate Control then just deactivate it with nowiki or whatever. I often edit userspace of others without discussion when the purpose is to remove a page from a category it shouldn't be in. Noone has ever commented on it. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:22, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Category tools

Hi! I am using WP:HOTCAT for easy editing of categories on articles/categories. Do we have any other tool on enwiki like Commons has a Gadget Cat-a-lot which helps you categorize even in the search result output or which can help in mass moving, copying of categories? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 07:30, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

@Dharmadhyaksha: You can use Cat-a-lot here, see User:קיפודנחש#Cat-A-Lot. Cheers LittleWink (talk) 19:19, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks a lot User:LittleWink for the help. This works good. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 05:46, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Count of pages in the category

Can quickly get the count of pages in the category and in all subcategories in it? For example, to find out how many pages in Category:History? Oxipetrina (talk) 11:32, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

@Oxipetrina: {{PAGESINCATEGORY:History}} → 51. More at WP:PF. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:55, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose64: It appears that 31 pages + 33 subcategories = 64 items in the category. I think Oxipetrina wanted to know the count of pages in Category:History and in all subcategories in Category:History. GoingBatty (talk) 01:30, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Categories aren't actually a tree structure, and semantic drift can be a problem. You'd need a tool that properly adds up the count in each subcategory while properly handling loops. I don't know whether such a tool already exists on Tool Labs or elsewhere. Anomie ⚔ 12:07, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-41

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 use the phab: and phabricator: interwikis to link to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org. [65] [66]
Some wikis have a template to track bugs in Bugzilla. You should update it to work with Phabricator. You can look at the one on mediawiki.org to see how. [67] [68]
You can look at Special:MediaStatistics to see what kind of files are on your wiki. [69]
A new tool can now create thumbnails of large TIFF images. This concerns files larger than 50 megapixels. These thumbnails are also sharpened. You can comment on Commons. [70]
The Media Viewer tool has a clearer link to the file page. It also has buttons to download, share and embed the file. You can enlarge images by clicking on them. [71]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf2) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 7 October, and on all Wikipedias from 9 October (calendar).
If you make a code mistake when editing a Lua script, you won't be able to save your edit. [72] [73]
We fixed some more Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 10, you will be able to use VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [74]
On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis. [75] [76]
You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8. [77]
1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [78]

Future changes

You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work. [79]
More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image. [80] [81]

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06:10, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Closings of FAC/FLC

We really need a new bot that completes the closings of FACs and FLCs — NickGibson3900 ^Talk 06:47, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Why I cannot create new articles from the search menu?

When searching for topics I no longer have the "create an article" options. What gives? This should be restored ASAP. We are likely loosing a number of articles as people give up on creating them; it was one of the easiest way to do so. To be frank, as an experienced Wikipedia who wrote over 1000 non-redirect articles, I am not sure how else to create an article other than red-link it somewhere first now. Seriously, who had this bright idea and needs to be WP:TROUTed? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:07, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

@Piotrus:, do you mean when you search for a title and at the top of the results it says: You may create the page "AAAAAAA'", but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered."? If so it is still their - NickGibson3900 ^Talk 08:12, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

@NickGibson3900: You are right. Instead, I think I found a bug - when searching for a text with quotation marks, this option disappears. I am now stubbing The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block", a topic that if you search for you'll not get this option (ditto for anything else with ""). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:15, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

The MediaWiki message containing the text is found at MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new, but if the search includes quotation marks the entire message is missing. This means that the behaviour is being caused by the MediaWiki software and not any templates on this wiki, but I'm not yet sure if it is intended or not. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 09:54, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

I think that the presence of quotes is taken to mean that you are performing a search for a regexp, not a literal page title. Anyway, per WP:O, all articles should have at least one incoming link, so what I do is to create that link first, then click on the new redlink to start creating the page. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:19, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

@Piotrus: Also, if you just want to create the page without worrying about links, you can always type the page name directly in the URL bar of your browser. The easy way to do that is to go to any Wikipedia page and replace the page name in the URL with your desired page name. (Although, of course, it would be better to fix the issue that you reported rather than relying on URL hacks.) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 10:39, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Many users made a search with quotation marks as part of the search syntax and then created the page with quotation marks which shouldn't be there (usually around the whole title), so it's deliberate that the option to create a page was removed. Curious admins can find thousands of deleted titles starting with a quotation mark at Special:Undelete. It only affects searches. Other methods to create a title with quotation marks still work, for example clicking a red link in a preview or saved page. If you use other search syntax like prefix: and intitle: then the creation option has also been removed. Some users actually created pages like Prefix:Wikipedia talk:Talk page guidelines/ and Intitle:Robert Byrd. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:19, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

If you don't already have a red link then the easiest way to create a title with quotation marks is perhaps to search it without the marks, click the red link on the search page, and then insert the marks directly in the url. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:36, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

bearing in mind that a quote mark in a URL may be disliked by some browsers so should be percent-encoded as %22 --Redrose64 (talk) 12:50, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Template:Only in print up for deletion

Please see Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2014 October 6#Template:Only in print. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:05, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

[1] [[National Statistics Office (Philippines)|]]

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