Contents
- 1 vertical bar in template parameter
- 2 Shutting off pings from specific users
- 3 SQL question
- 4 comparing revisions across two or more history pages without missing some in between
- 5 Page size dumps
- 6 Quotation marks breaking URL display
- 7 Edit summary maxlength
- 8 "jump up to ^"
- 9 Florence Rush
- 10 Tech News: 2015-42
- 11 Blank image
- 12 Article Feedback Activity Log erased
- 13 Revising Special:WantedPages
- 14 Is there a way to auto-populate categories through Wikidata/other wiki comparison?
- 15 Page Padding
- 16 WP:FLAGCRUFT malicious?
- 17 Why can't I see the deleted version of David Godman
- 18 Table won't sort
- 19 Cascading protection glitch
- 20 Apostroph problem
- 21 The Article Traffic Statistics tool need to be updated badly
- 22 Pages without JS or CSS via Google
- 23 Searching for a template following a string
- 24 Why do all pages look blank?
- 25 Phabricator request, please
- 26 Blanked articles
- 27 Ramanaw mallam
- 28 Disable Visual editor globally
- 29 Template help needed (I think)
- 30 Automated archiving fails
- 31 Long pages data needs updating
- 32 Twinkle broken?
- 33 Block lengths
- 34 Where can I go for coding help?
- 35 Tech News: 2015-43
- 36 Bot borked
- 37 Blocked!
- 38 Pageview Stats down again
- 39 spurious nbsp with infobox cyclist
- 40 Read in another language button on mobile Wikipedia showing in Urdu
- 41 Strange breakage when editing a category
- 42 Favicon
- 43 Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting
- 44 I want to reuse a photo in another Wikipedia article
- 45 Patrolling my new creations
- 46 Blacklisted…
- 47 Give out Deletion to Quality Awards and log at Hall of Fame
- 48 Urgent request: unblock IP address for training session
- 49 Citation error
- 50 Watchlist
- 51 Not getting notices
- 52 I thought IPs were unable to create articles
- 53 Reporting - Category:WikiProject assessments not updating
- 54 "Due to high database server lag, changes newer than 44 seconds may not appear in this list."
- 55 Case sensitivity
- 56 Sort and prune my watchlist?
- 57 Please add this to Special:ActiveUsers article
- 58 Test rendering of SVG files
- 59 Interlanguage links missing for de:Steinkohle
- 60 List of top-class stubs
- 61 500 Internal Server Error
- 62 Wikipedia down
- 63 Images and responsive design
- 64 Tech News: 2015-44
- 65 Image viewer fails to load image
- 66 Module:External links and wikibase.getEntity( id )
- 67 Problem with rendering of tex vline
- 68 Have people always get notified when they receive a response to their post.
- 69 Find me a new teammate?
- 70 Characters replaced with #
- 71 wikitable IPA no longer working?
- 72 Wikidata descriptions
- 73 Contributions from IP ranges
- 74 Banner colliding with name
- 75 SUL issue
- 76 Watchlist and your opinion
- 77 Automatically detecting edit types -- New project. Help wanted.
- 78 Blank Afd page
- 79 Reducing the load of WP:TAFI unofficial-manager Northamerica1000
- 80 red box with deletion-log no longer visible (to some wikipedians) , unless deletion was "within the last 24 hours"
- 81 Pageview stats case insensitive
- 82 Any tool for counting transclusions of many templates?
- 83 HOVER LINK: HIDDEN ERROR: Usage of "_VALUE_" is not recognized
- 84 GALLERY broken?
- 85 5,000,000 articles logo needs to be put in place
- 86 Counting growth in article types: Did we just have a 37% spike in Women architects?
- 87 Log out
- 88 Help someone fix a small bug in your code project: It's Google Code-In time!
- 89 WP shortcuts appear to be broken
- 90 Is Wikipedia development slowing down?
- 91 Template FlagATHCH
- 92 Wrongly initialised chevrons in mobile version of articles
- 93 Redirects
- 94 Tech News: 2015-45
- 95 Transclusion backlinks disappear when a page is blanked
- 96 IPv6 incompatibility: information thingamabob on user talk pages for anonymous users
- 97 Women's college basketball team roster formats with "Lady" in team name
- 98 Page curation
- 99 Patrol log
- 100 Issue when redirects on Wikipedia and redirect on Commons have the same title
- 101 Category membership issues
- 102 JavaScript gadget problems
- 103 How to see what links to a particular section of an article?
- 104 Watchlist subpages
- 105 Javascript puts logo with banner back
- 106 Adding Template:Main Page banner to the Mobile site front page
- 107 Move log
- 108 Recent contributions from a group of editors
- 109 distance around .OGG files?
- 110 List of Wikipedians by article count
- 111 Import limits
- 112 Main Page oldid pages lack revision info – they look like live pages
- 113 Safari not displaying images in articles
- 114 Has Wiki Code change Prevented saving as "Web Page Complete?"
- 115 User profile
- 116 Underlined links
vertical bar in template parameter
Is there a way to escape a | in a template? A page title contains a | and I'm trying to use {{cite web|title = Title with | in it|date= ...NE Ent 13:35, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
- In {{cite web}}, use %7c inside
|url=
and | in any other parameter when you want to write a vertical bar. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:48, 3 October 2015 (UTC)- Alternatively, you can place | within nowiki tags, i.e. <nowiki>|</nowiki>. 2607:FB90:21C9:F62A:0:37:4515:9301 (talk) 17:39, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
- @NE Ent: Very often, a pipe in the title of a web page is used to separate the true title of a web page from the name of the website. They might be in either order. So, a web page that is titled like "Guaranteed Roadrunner Trap | Acme" or like "Acme | Guaranteed Roadrunner Trap" would be split into
|title=Guaranteed Roadrunner Trap
|website=Acme
. If you provide the URL of the web page, I can look at it to advise on the best action. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:54, 3 October 2015 (UTC)- Also, {{!}} will do the trick. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 04:08, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks. It's "blah blah blah | Science News" -- I don't what ya'll consider the true title ... I just use what is between the <title> </title> tags on the page. NE Ent 12:31, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- Also, {{!}} will do the trick. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 04:08, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
- @NE Ent: Very often, a pipe in the title of a web page is used to separate the true title of a web page from the name of the website. They might be in either order. So, a web page that is titled like "Guaranteed Roadrunner Trap | Acme" or like "Acme | Guaranteed Roadrunner Trap" would be split into
- Alternatively, you can place | within nowiki tags, i.e. <nowiki>|</nowiki>. 2607:FB90:21C9:F62A:0:37:4515:9301 (talk) 17:39, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
Shutting off pings from specific users
I really do like the pings in general, and I can apparently shut them off overall, but sometimes I'm dealing with a user who has gotten "ping-happy" and stays that way even after I've asked them to stop doing that. I don't want to go as far as reporting the user, but I sure would like to have their pings to me shut off. Is there any way this can happen? Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 16:09, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
- Probably better place to ask is WT:Echo, but it sounds like a good idea. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:30, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks. I am continuing to get ping-abused from two particular editors. So I would love a solution. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 18:43, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
SQL question
I've been trying to find out the total admin actions per month in order to answer a question at WT:RFA, but I've been having problems running my SQL query on Quarry. My query to find the total admin actions for September ran fine, but when I tried to expand that to all months from January 2001, my query took over 20 minutes to execute and was killed. Is there anything I can do to improve the efficiency of this, or am I better off just making separate database queries for each month from an external script? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:49, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- Backend is mysql? If log_timestamp isn't indexed, it's likely to be slow regardless of your query. You could try using the IN operator [1] instead of the multiple OR statements. NE Ent 12:29, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for the tips. :) Yes, it's mysql. I've tried using the IN operator and also reducing the number of dates from 1000 to 300, so we'll see if that helps. It's waiting in the queue now, but there are no other queries running - I think I might have lost my right to have it executed straight away after the previous two attempts... — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:40, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- Actually, I just saw this example query, which is an approach that should be much more efficient. I'll give that one a try. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:19, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for the tips. :) Yes, it's mysql. I've tried using the IN operator and also reducing the number of dates from 1000 to 300, so we'll see if that helps. It's waiting in the queue now, but there are no other queries running - I think I might have lost my right to have it executed straight away after the previous two attempts... — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:40, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- You can also sign up for a tool labs account and run the query manually instead of using quarry :) Legoktm (talk) 15:08, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- I have one, actually, but I wanted to do it on Quarry so that other people could easily see the results and maybe modify the query. In any case it will have to wait, as I'm getting "SELECT command denied" errors at the moment. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:43, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's because you are trying to run the query on the private "enwiki" database, not "enwiki_p" which is public. I just ran it on enwiki_p here. --Glaisher (talk) 15:55, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- BTW, you don't have to include
USE enwiki_p;
. For enwiki it's there by default. Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:56, 10 October 2015 (UTC) - Ah, that makes sense, thanks. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 16:58, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- BTW, you don't have to include
- It's because you are trying to run the query on the private "enwiki" database, not "enwiki_p" which is public. I just ran it on enwiki_p here. --Glaisher (talk) 15:55, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- I have one, actually, but I wanted to do it on Quarry so that other people could easily see the results and maybe modify the query. In any case it will have to wait, as I'm getting "SELECT command denied" errors at the moment. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:43, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
comparing revisions across two or more history pages without missing some in between
When searching old revisions by comparing an older one with a newer one that necessarily are listed on different pages of the page's history, a searcher ordinarily conducts two or more searches, thereby missing the effect of one intermediate revision listed at the bottom of a history page (or two intermediate revisions at the bottom of two history pages, etc.). This is because the older revision selected on the history page is not itself reflected in the top of the resulting diff, but only implied in the midst of everything still older, thus easily missed or misunderstood. It is possible to solve this by manually constructing a URL, but that possibility is easily missed by users.
Example (frequent editing of the article will quickly make this outdated but nonetheless the model applies):
- Newest 500
- Next older 500
- Still older 500
- Combined URL for 1,500 (not showing number of intermediate revisions)
- Combined URL for newest 1,000 (showing number of intermediate revisions)
Perhaps this can be solved with a technical solution.
Nick Levinson (talk) 02:00, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
- You can list up to 5000 revisions at once in a page history. Careful setting of the "From year (and earlier)"/"From month (and earlier)" options will bring the appropriate revision close to the top; or you can set
&offset=
This will allow you to get both on the same screen. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:43, 4 October 2015 (UTC)- That's complicated for most users and not explained where most users would likely see it, and I know how to get up to 500 revisions in a page history, not 5,000. Can this be explained with a link from history pages or the procedure technically simplified? Nick Levinson (talk) 00:41, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- If you click a number of revisions then you get a url where the number can manually be changed to anything up to 5000. I suspect the interface links stop at 500 for performance reasons. I don't know whether it's OK to advertise the 5000 method on page histories. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:40, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- That's complicated for most users and not explained where most users would likely see it, and I know how to get up to 500 revisions in a page history, not 5,000. Can this be explained with a link from history pages or the procedure technically simplified? Nick Levinson (talk) 00:41, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- If we were at WP:VPR, I'd oppose adding even a little to the page history page with so little need for it. Thankfully, we're not. At least you have some way of getting what you need. Maybe an addition to Help:Page history about this would be warranted, and the page history page already has a link to that page. ―Mandruss ☎ 09:55, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- For comparison, user contributions link to Help:User contributions which already says: "The blue numbers list the number of edits displayed on a page: 20, 50, 100, 250 or 500. The number you select replaces n in the links to the previous or next pages e.g. (newer 100 / older 100). Views of up to 5000 edits per page are possible by modifying the URL." PrimeHunter (talk) 10:28, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
Page size dumps
Does anyone know if there is a dump file of en.wikipedia which contains some measure of the size of each page, without having to waste the bandwidth downloading all the page contents. Thanks. HYanWong (talk) 14:04, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- To answer my own question, in enwiki-XXXXX-page.sql.gz ('only' a 1.2Gb download), the penultimate column in the 'page' table is a field named 'page_len', which gives this statistic.HYanWong (talk) 22:09, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- @HYanWong: What do you need the data for? Instead of downloading a dump, it might be better to run an SQL query on Quarry. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:50, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Mr. Stradivarius: I want to find out the page size of about 1.5 million pages (all living organisms), which I'm going to combine with page views from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ to assess some measure of popularity of each species or higher level group. Thanks for the tip about Quarry: is it considered reasonable behaviour to ask for such large datasets via SQL? HYanWong (talk) 07:51, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- I think in this case downloading enwiki-XXXXX-page.sql.gz would be better solution. I once run a query on Quarry, that returned 30,000 pages, it was fine, but you most probably won't get 1.5 million pages returned. But you can try :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:37, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks. An additional problem in this case is that the query itself contains 1.5 million page titles (grabbed from the wikidata dump), so even sending the query in the first place will be a pain! HYanWong (talk) 10:03, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Hint (but probably not for this case). Put links to pages in some user-space page, then use pagelinks table joined with page table in Quarry. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks. An additional problem in this case is that the query itself contains 1.5 million page titles (grabbed from the wikidata dump), so even sending the query in the first place will be a pain! HYanWong (talk) 10:03, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- P.s. I would like to document somewhere that the page lengths are present in XXX-page.sql.gz, but not sure where best to add documentation. Suggestions? (edit: maybe best to change the summary in the dump listing to "Base per-page data (id, title, old restrictions, page size etc).", but that's not user editable)HYanWong (talk) 10:05, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- I think in this case downloading enwiki-XXXXX-page.sql.gz would be better solution. I once run a query on Quarry, that returned 30,000 pages, it was fine, but you most probably won't get 1.5 million pages returned. But you can try :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:37, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Mr. Stradivarius: I want to find out the page size of about 1.5 million pages (all living organisms), which I'm going to combine with page views from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ to assess some measure of popularity of each species or higher level group. Thanks for the tip about Quarry: is it considered reasonable behaviour to ask for such large datasets via SQL? HYanWong (talk) 07:51, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- @HYanWong: What do you need the data for? Instead of downloading a dump, it might be better to run an SQL query on Quarry. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:50, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Quotation marks breaking URL display
I've noticed just recently that there seems to have been a change to how external links are parsed that seems problematic. In particular, note how this:
[http://example.com?foo="bar"&bar="baz" Foobar]
renders as
i.e. that the "bar"&bar="baz"
is included in the displayed URL, which is obviously unintended. This can be manually solved, i.e. by changing "
to %22
:
However, since there are many, many such links that would have to be fixed (in no small part Google Books URLs), this is probably something that needs to be dealt with on the software end of things. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 17:09, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- This isn't a new thing - I remember running into this years ago when I was making a template (can't remember which one offhand). — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 17:21, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, it's listed at Help:URL#Fixing links with unsupported characters. The example here was also broken when The Internet Archive first archived the page in [2] 14 August 2014. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:36, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- I'm seeing the issue, in particular, in some citations. I don't recall seeing that one before. Possibly something's changed in one of the involved templates? Possibly something in this change? {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 18:44, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- Could you give us an example of a place where you're seeing problems? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:13, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Nihiltres, the CS1 citation templates were recently (Sep 25 or 26) updated to feature more robust checking of URL parameters in the templates. I recommend reposting your question at Help talk:Citation Style 1 with some examples from articles. It is possible that the enhanced error detection has resulted in a change in the displayed link. It is also possible that the link wasn't working to begin with, and the new display is a side effect that will go away when the link is fixed.
- Could you give us an example of a place where you're seeing problems? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:13, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- I'm seeing the issue, in particular, in some citations. I don't recall seeing that one before. Possibly something's changed in one of the involved templates? Possibly something in this change? {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 18:44, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, it's listed at Help:URL#Fixing links with unsupported characters. The example here was also broken when The Internet Archive first archived the page in [2] 14 August 2014. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:36, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
-
-
-
-
- Since the change, Category:Pages with URL errors has increased its population from roughly zero articles, where it had been for over a year, to 13,000+ articles. We have some citation template URLs to fix. All of you VPT watchers are welcome to come over and fix a hundred or so. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:35, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
-
-
-
Edit summary maxlength
WP:ES#The 250 character limit claims an edit summary is limited to 255 bytes (not characters). I recall seeing some language to the effect that the limit was around 230 so a few multibyte UTF-8 characters wouldn't overflow. However, there is now a hard limit of maxlength="200"
, although possibly that can be overridden with JavaScript? Has maxlength been reduced in the last few months? Johnuniq (talk) 03:21, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- I must be misremembering because looking at some old source for EditPage.php makes it appear nothing has changed for several years, and "maxlength is overridden in JS to 255 and to make it use UTF-8 bytes, not characters" (what is a UTF-8 byte?). Johnuniq (talk) 06:58, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Where do you see this
maxlength="200"
? - The maximum typeable length and the maximum storable length are not the same thing. The maximum storable length has always been 255 bytes. Edit summaries are stored as UTF-8, and a character like the en-dash (–) occupies three bytes when stored in this manner. The maximum typeable length was 200 characters for several years, there was a gadget that could increase this to (I think) 250; but that became redundant when the limit imposed by the MediaWiki software was increased two or three years back. If those 250 or so characters were more than 255 bytes when encoded as UTF-8, the excess would be truncated. The maximum typeable length is presently 255 bytes; if you type an edit summary using pure ASCII characters, you can enter 255 before it stops letting you type; if you type an edit summary using only characters that are three bytes in UTF-8 (e.g. Japanese script), you'll find that it won't let you enter more than 85. So unless you use characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane that encode as four or more bytes (Unicode code points U+10000 or higher), the practical typing limit is between 85 and 255 characters. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:40, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks but I think "maximum typeable length is presently 255 bytes" is only correct if JavaScript is enabled—I can only type 200 characters with scripting off. The
maxlength="200"
is in the html source of a page with an edit summary and is what tells my browser (when JavaScript is disabled) to not accept more than 200 characters in the edit summary box. If anyone wants to experiment, the box following has one physical line starting with "A" and finishing with "Z". The line is 497 bytes = 200 characters. With scripting off, I can paste the line into an edit summary, but previewing shows the summary truncated. For some reason, when JavaScript is enabled, pasting the line does not work (it is truncated).
- Thanks but I think "maximum typeable length is presently 255 bytes" is only correct if JavaScript is enabled—I can only type 200 characters with scripting off. The
- Where do you see this
A—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×—×Z
-
-
- Johnuniq (talk) 10:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, with JavaScript you can enter UTF-8 characters which use up to 255 bytes, which is was the database field can hold. With JavaScript off you can enter 200 UTF-8 characters regardless how many bytes they use, but on preview or save they are truncated to use at most 255 bytes. The situation is confusing for users without JavaScript but I don't know whether it's possible without JavaScript to make an input field which counts bytes and not characters. The 200 limit without JavaScript is a compromise: Large enough for most edit summaries, and limits the number of times an edit summary must be truncated because it breaks the 255-byte limit by having too many multi-byte UTF-8 characters. Languages with non-Latin scripts have more problems with this. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:52, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes users with Javascript will get a better experience, because this check is not possibly with plain HTML. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:12, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- How do I turn off JavaScript in Firefox 41.0.1? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:51, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Tools/Add-ons - Click on Disable next to NoScript. Then you have to close your browser and restart it for the disable to take affect. — Maile (talk) 20:57, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's not there. I only have two entries: Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant (disabled) and RealDownloader (disabled). --Redrose64 (talk) 22:58, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- NoScript is a Firefox extension Maile has installed. Most Firefox users don't have it. It has controls to allow or disallow JavaScript for each website. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:07, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's not there. I only have two entries: Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant (disabled) and RealDownloader (disabled). --Redrose64 (talk) 22:58, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- In about:config there is javascript.enabled. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 21:01, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Tools/Add-ons - Click on Disable next to NoScript. Then you have to close your browser and restart it for the disable to take affect. — Maile (talk) 20:57, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- How do I turn off JavaScript in Firefox 41.0.1? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:51, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes users with Javascript will get a better experience, because this check is not possibly with plain HTML. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:12, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, with JavaScript you can enter UTF-8 characters which use up to 255 bytes, which is was the database field can hold. With JavaScript off you can enter 200 UTF-8 characters regardless how many bytes they use, but on preview or save they are truncated to use at most 255 bytes. The situation is confusing for users without JavaScript but I don't know whether it's possible without JavaScript to make an input field which counts bytes and not characters. The 200 limit without JavaScript is a compromise: Large enough for most edit summaries, and limits the number of times an edit summary must be truncated because it breaks the 255-byte limit by having too many multi-byte UTF-8 characters. Languages with non-Latin scripts have more problems with this. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:52, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Johnuniq (talk) 10:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
-
"jump up to ^"
Sometimes when I look at articles and see the citations at the bottom, instead of just having the "^" caret, it will say before it, linked in blue) "jump up to ^", next to every citation. It's ugly and quite redundant. Is this a Wikipedia issue or is it on my end? I use Firefox on a Macmini. 108.54.167.196 (talk) 15:14, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- WP:Village pump (technical)/Archive 140#Jump up!. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:20, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Florence Rush
I added an infobox to Florence Rush and the entire article disappeared (diff), I've reverted for now, can someone please take a look? --The Vintage Feminist (talk) 15:52, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Done. You had left in the opening part of an html comment before the death date and age template, The Vintage Feminist, but not the matching close, so everything after that, including the template close, was swallowed in the comment, leaving only an unclosed template call. DES (talk) 15:59, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Oops, okay thanks. --The Vintage Feminist (talk) 16:08, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Tech News: 2015-42
16:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Blank image
File:GrahamCube.svg has started rendering blank for no apparent reason. It used to be ok in the article. Clicking through to the image it is still there and no new versions have been uploaded. SpinningSpark 21:37, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- I've fixed the file by adding the
type="text/css"
attribute to the <style> element. Unlike in HTML, that attribute seems to be required for CSS stylesheets to work in SVG. SiBr4 (talk) 21:51, 12 October 2015 (UTC)- Funny that it used to be ok though. Something must have changed somewhere. SpinningSpark 22:04, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, the documented behaviour is that in the absence of any other indication, the default is "text/css". --Redrose64 (talk) 23:26, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- Funny that it used to be ok though. Something must have changed somewhere. SpinningSpark 22:04, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Article Feedback Activity Log erased
Some entries in Special:Log have only a single word after the user page, talk page, and contribs links. Those entries were in the Article Feedback Activity Log, and had some text that got erased after AFT became obsolete on March 3, 2014. The entries that were in the Article Feedback Activity Log should be completely erased. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:55, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- Because the Article Feedback extension was uninstalled, its log entry formatter is no longer available, so these logs are presented in a pretty useless raw form. The relevant Phabricator task is phab:T64722. — This, that and the other (talk) 06:10, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
Revising Special:WantedPages
There is fairly universal agreement, at Wikipedia talk:Special:WantedPages, that this automated list is, in its current form, almost worthless. That's because the high-count items are being generated by either signatures on article talk and other pages, or by templates on article talk pages.
What is useful is Wikipedia:Most-wanted articles. That's built using red links from article pages, only. But it's not automatically generated - it's not a special page.
So, a purely technical question: Who has the authority/ability to modify the parameters that generate the Special:WantedPages content? I'm aiming, of course, at getting those parameters changed so that only red links on article pages will count; I'd like to know who has to be convinced that the current content isn't worthwhile. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:36, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
- WantedPages is hard-coded into the MediaWiki software as including pages from all namespaces. So there is no parameter to change at the moment. The relevant task is phab:T37758.
- Personally I think the query pages need a lot of help, since most of them (not just WantedPages) are pretty worthless on large wikis like English Wikipedia. Unless and until any improvements are made, Labs is the best place for developers to create improved alternatives to the query pages. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:21, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's used by the ContentTranslation feature, so it is very prominently linked at user contribution pages under "New contribution". Gparyani (talk) 18:08, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- The answer to the specific question you asked is that you need developer-level rights to change that, because it's hardcoded in the software and thus needs a software change to change. (It might also need a change to the database schema, and the like; it doesn't strike me as the type of thing that would be easy to do efficiently with the current software.) Gparyani's response is a good guide as to how you might practically go about getting it changed. --ais523 22:03, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
Is there a way to auto-populate categories through Wikidata/other wiki comparison?
I just created Category:Polish skydivers and Category:Cichociemni, both based on Polish Wikipedia categories (linked through Wikidata). Now, pl wiki categories have quite a few entries, and I expect 20-30% of them are on en wiki already. Is there some way (bot, script) that would automate checking which entries categorized under equivalent Polish categories exist here, and auto-tag them? It seems like something that should be possible to automate. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:15, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
- If nobody has better solution, I have one, but it's quite crappy. Take Autolist, fill the parameters and get the list of Wikidata items. The URL with parameters for Cichociemni is here (it will take some few minutes to open). Then you can open each article and add category by yourself. Yes, it doesn't actually ease the work very much :D --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:51, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
- But anyway - Like the idea. Would really like to use such tool, which at least gets that list of pages, that needs to be categorised. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:22, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Magnus Manske: Possible? --Izno (talk) 03:09, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- Well, you can use PagePile. Generate a list of pages on plwiki in a category in QuickIntersection, then filter the pagepile here, by "converting" it to Wikidata, then to enwiki; try "Load from PasteBin" with ID d6653a0c to see what I mean. You now have a list of all enwiki articles that correspond to plwiki articles on Polish skydivers. Convert that back into Wikidata, then load it in autolist, and set "pages in enwiki category Polish skydivers" as "NOT". You will then get all Polish skydivers from plwiki that are on enwiki but not in the enwiki category "Polish skydivers". The parts are all there, you just need to connect them :-) --Magnus Manske (talk) 12:13, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Magnus Manske, Izno, and Edgars2007: My eyes glazed a bit reading the how to... any chance somebody (pretty please) could hack together a tool which would make it as easy as typing in/linking the two categories (English and Polish)? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:49, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- Actually, I think I already wrote this but forgot about it ;-) Is this what you want? --Magnus Manske (talk) 18:21, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Magnus Manske: No, it actually does the opposite - it finds articles, which are in plwiki, but not in enwiki. BTW, if we have already started to talk about the tool - sometimes it isn't working, if there is more than 100 results. See here (fill in "WDQ":
tree[211][150][17,131] OR claim[27:211]
) - 101st result and so on isn't right... And if I tick "Source Wikipedia", then at page 2 the tick is on "Wikidata". --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:31, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Magnus Manske: No, it actually does the opposite - it finds articles, which are in plwiki, but not in enwiki. BTW, if we have already started to talk about the tool - sometimes it isn't working, if there is more than 100 results. See here (fill in "WDQ":
- Actually, I think I already wrote this but forgot about it ;-) Is this what you want? --Magnus Manske (talk) 18:21, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Magnus Manske, Izno, and Edgars2007: My eyes glazed a bit reading the how to... any chance somebody (pretty please) could hack together a tool which would make it as easy as typing in/linking the two categories (English and Polish)? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:49, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- Well, you can use PagePile. Generate a list of pages on plwiki in a category in QuickIntersection, then filter the pagepile here, by "converting" it to Wikidata, then to enwiki; try "Load from PasteBin" with ID d6653a0c to see what I mean. You now have a list of all enwiki articles that correspond to plwiki articles on Polish skydivers. Convert that back into Wikidata, then load it in autolist, and set "pages in enwiki category Polish skydivers" as "NOT". You will then get all Polish skydivers from plwiki that are on enwiki but not in the enwiki category "Polish skydivers". The parts are all there, you just need to connect them :-) --Magnus Manske (talk) 12:13, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Page Padding
Am I delusional or was the padding on the mw-body class recently changed? It seems most noticeable on the Main Page where there seems to be a larger white gap along the left edge than I recall seeing in the past. Dragons flight (talk) 20:21, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- No recent changes. But in Vector, the padding does change from 1 to 1.5em when the screen width goes above 982px. It has been doing that form some years now. Have you gotten a bigger screen perhaps?
-- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}
10:57, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
WP:FLAGCRUFT malicious?
I have recently inserted the WP:FLAGCRUFT js code, and found out it could be malicious. Simple question here: is it really that bad or is there really nothing to worry about here? --JB82 (talk) 14:49, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- What do you mean by "found out it could be malicious"? If you mean you see MediaWiki:Jswarning on your css and js pages then it's a standard warning always shown on those pages regardless of content. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:41, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- Adding JavaScript code to your user JS pages can do pretty much anything to your account (e.g. cause it to make edits, etc.). As such, it's best to ensure that any scripts you place on the page are written by someone trustworthy (or alternatively by an administrator; there's no loss of security there because administrators can edit other people's user JS pages anyway). The message there is just a scary warning to try to prevent people from installing dubious scripts they found outside Wikipedia. --ais523 21:55, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
Why can't I see the deleted version of David Godman
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David Godman shows this article was deleted by AfD in July 2008. It was recreated in October 2008 but I can't find the deleted versions. Doug Weller (talk) 14:11, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- It appears that the article was moved to User:Iddli/David Godman. Elockid(Boo!) 14:18, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- That means then that it wasn't deleted in July, I guess. Pretty promotional. Doug Weller (talk) 15:03, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- Click "View logs for this page" at top of the page history to see [6] which shows it was deleted in July 2008, and in October 2008 it was restored, moved to User:Iddli/David Godman, and the resulting redirect was deleted. The recreation was in November 2008. It was later deleted again and then restored including the October 2008 redirect from the move, which is why the visible page history currently starts there. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:35, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks PrimeHunter - I don't think that's a very satisfactory way of handling an article, especially as it lost all its attribution history before October 2008. Doug Weller (talk) 17:38, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I've done the hist merge, so all the history is at David Godman now. —SpacemanSpiff 17:46, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- That means then that it wasn't deleted in July, I guess. Pretty promotional. Doug Weller (talk) 15:03, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
Table won't sort
On List of Xbox Live Arcade games, there is a table of 707 rows. (At least, the article says there are 707 games. I haven't counted the rows.) When clicking the arrow next to the text of the "Release Date" column header, there is a delay of a few seconds, and then the arrow will change, as expected; but the table does not sort.
I don't see this behavior when sorting by the other columns; the table sorts normally after clicking one of those arrows. Tarcil (talk) 00:03, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Tarcil: I've fixed this by adding
data-sort-value
for each of the rows, as described at Help:Sorting#Specifying a sort key for a cell. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:20, 10 October 2015 (UTC)- @Mr. Stradivarius: Thank you! Is there an item on the developers' backlog to automate this for the thousands (I assume) of tables on Wikipedia that don't include this markup? Tarcil (talk) 17:42, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Tarcil: No - I think this is more of an editor task than a developer task. Having said that, it would be good to find a way of tracking which tables have columns that can't sort so that they can be dealt with by AWB or by bot. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 22:06, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Mr. Stradivarius: Thank you! Is there an item on the developers' backlog to automate this for the thousands (I assume) of tables on Wikipedia that don't include this markup? Tarcil (talk) 17:42, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- Works fine for me. Tvx1 01:20, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
- Is it really necessary to link all those years? That's the reason the sorting breaks (it would not need a sort key otherwise), and it seems excessive to me. nyuszika7h (talk) 16:06, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
Cascading protection glitch
Are users here who are template editors but not admins able to edit Template:Center? I ask because I appear to have caused a glitch which makes it cascade-protected from a deleted page. Here's how it happened:
- I notice that when I edited Template:Center, there was a notice above the edit box that said it was cascade-protected from File:Onion Powder, Penzeys Spices, Arlington Heights MA.jpg. I decide that this protection isn't serving any purpose, as the file is no longer visible on the main page.
- I delete File:Onion Powder, Penzeys Spices, Arlington Heights MA.jpg without unprotecting it. I thought this would remove the protection and make pages fetch the file from Commons, all in one edit.
- I reduce Template:Center to template-protection.
- Template:Center is now displayed as template-protected, but when editing it the notice that says that it is cascade-protected is still there. The difference is that instead of File:Onion Powder, Penzeys Spices, Arlington Heights MA.jpg being listed as a source, there are no sources listed.
I'm guessing that this will have to go to Phabricator, but if there's a way we can resolve it here, that would be nice. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:09, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- To me it shows the "template protected" message now. Not a template editor or administrator.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 11:11, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- I think that the glitch may have defeated the protection level detection code that makes the "template protected" message, as it relies on the CASCADINGSOURCES magic word producing some text, but if there are no sources then the output will just be blank. I am also guessing a similar thing happened with the Lua code that checks for cascading protection to see what colour the padlock icons should be. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:19, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- Also, I should add that after I deleted File:Onion Powder, Penzeys Spices, Arlington Heights MA.jpg I restored it, then tried cascade-protecting it and then unprotecting it again, but it didn't seem to make any difference. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:12, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- I placed the "Template editor" right on an alternate account of mine and loaded the edit page. I did get the page (I didn't actually try to change anything there), along with the warning that only admins can edit it due to cascade protection. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:37, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- For me (TE) it displays the "cascade-protected" warning alongside the template-protection one, though it seems I am able to edit the template normally: the edit box is pink and unlocked, and there are "save"/"preview"/"changes" buttons, unlike when I try to edit a fully protected page. SiBr4 (talk) 13:39, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- Phabricator would be the place for this, yes. Checking the database, what's going on is basically what you guessed: the deletion of the cascade-protected page should have deleted the protection entry (and other links table entries), but it did not. Unfortunately undeleting the page would have no effect, since the links table entries are tied using the page_id value and undeleting assigns a new page_id rather than reusing the old page_id (T60986 seems to be commenting on that situation). I've fixed this specific issue by deleting the problematic database row, and I don't see any others on enwiki. See T115586 for tracking the underlying cause of the issue. BJorsch (WMF) (talk) 13:08, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Apostroph problem
Not sure if this is the correct place to report this. I noticed a redlink in the second section of the HMS Chevron article. I copied the word (Ma’apilim) into the searchbox, and from there created a new article and made it a redirect to where other versions of this word, such as Maapilim go. It's still red. Apparently that specific apostrophe (’) gets substituted to another kind (') from search but not from links in articles. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 17:01, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- The best way to create a new article from a red link is to click on it. No need to use search. Ruslik_Zero 18:13, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- Generally, we should use straight apostrophes instead of curly ones. You should correct the text in the article. But in my opinion, it would make sense if the software treated straight and curly marks as the same for linking. I think it's a similar problem for capitals. Both cases are treated the same in the search, but in links they're not unless they're at the start of the word (or at least, that's how it used to be). McLerristarr | Mclay1 18:14, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- @No More Mr Nice Guy: I cannot reproduce this in Firefox. If I enter Ma’apilim in the search box and choose "containing..." (which is now needed to avoid the redirect you created at Ma'apilim) then I get a search results page [7] saying: You may create the page "Ma’apilim". Clicking the red link leads me to a page creation window with the curly apostrophe and not to the redirect you created. What is your browser and what do you see at [8]? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:27, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I was using Chrome but I get the same behavior in Firefox. If I hit "containing..." I get the same results as you describe. If I hit enter it takes me to the redirect with the substituted apostrophe. I could create another redirect that would solve the redlink problem, but this behavior is not what a user would expect, I think. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 22:54, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I still don't understand how you created a redirect with a straight apostrophe after entering a title with a curly apostrophe in the search box. Let's try an example where neither version matches a current page name, like your original case before creating the redirect. If I enter Ma’ap (curly apostrophe) in the search box then I get: You may create the page "Ma’ap". If I click the red link then I go to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ma%E2%80%99ap&action=edit&redlink=1 with a curly apostrophe %E2%80%99 in the url. If I enter Ma'ap (straight apostrophe) in the search box then I get: You may create the page "Ma'ap". If I click the red link then I go to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ma%27ap&action=edit&redlink=1 with a straight apostrophe %27 in the url. Do you get the same result as me in both cases, or do you get the version with the straight apostrophe regardless whether you entered a curly or straight apostrophe in the search box? I have tested it in Chrome 46.0.2490.71 on Windows Vista and I get the same result as in Firefox. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:14, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I get the same result. I don't remember what I did, to be honest. It's possible I didn't notice the curliness at first, I guess, so I typed it in rather than copied it? I'm fairly but not 100% sure I copied it. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 23:56, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I still don't understand how you created a redirect with a straight apostrophe after entering a title with a curly apostrophe in the search box. Let's try an example where neither version matches a current page name, like your original case before creating the redirect. If I enter Ma’ap (curly apostrophe) in the search box then I get: You may create the page "Ma’ap". If I click the red link then I go to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ma%E2%80%99ap&action=edit&redlink=1 with a curly apostrophe %E2%80%99 in the url. If I enter Ma'ap (straight apostrophe) in the search box then I get: You may create the page "Ma'ap". If I click the red link then I go to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ma%27ap&action=edit&redlink=1 with a straight apostrophe %27 in the url. Do you get the same result as me in both cases, or do you get the version with the straight apostrophe regardless whether you entered a curly or straight apostrophe in the search box? I have tested it in Chrome 46.0.2490.71 on Windows Vista and I get the same result as in Firefox. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:14, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I was using Chrome but I get the same behavior in Firefox. If I hit "containing..." I get the same results as you describe. If I hit enter it takes me to the redirect with the substituted apostrophe. I could create another redirect that would solve the redlink problem, but this behavior is not what a user would expect, I think. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 22:54, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
The Article Traffic Statistics tool need to be updated badly
Hi my name is SeminoleNation and I have been wondering if Wikipedia plans on implementing a stable way of looking at article traffic statistics. The current http://stats.grok.se/ link is very unstable and frequently crashes and will lose information of multiple days at a time. Thank you--SeminoleNation (talk) 21:51, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- Hmm, Analytics folks might be the best to ask. You could ask on the Analytics mailing list for example. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:21, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Pages without JS or CSS via Google
Some of you might be interested in this: Especially for slow connections, Google sometimes sends a stripped-down version of a webpage to users, with limited Javascript and CSS. You can see what it looks like here with the article about Oxygen: https://icl.googleusercontent.com/?lite_url=http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen
I believe this only happens on the mobile site, but I'm not certain of that. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Searching for a template following a string
I tried asking a question at AWB tasks, but that may not be the best place (or maybe it was TLDR).
I want to use AWB to improve some references. I can find each of the references because they are all named references, but the field to be replaced is not necessarily unique, mainly because the access date might vary. My goal is to search for a particular named reference, then locate the immediately following cite web template, and replace the contents of that template with a value.
I'm not quite sure how to do the specification in AWB (or if there is some better way to do it).
I've started the creation of a table to identify the replacement strings here (The table currently has only five entries but there will be dozens when I complete it).
Can someone tell me if it is possible to search for a template following a string, or if there is a better way to approach this?--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:50, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- Is the opening reference tag always in the form
<ref name="name">
? Are you replacing the{{cite web}}
template in toto? then:- find:
(\<ref\s+name\s*=\s*"name"\s*\>)\{\{\s*cite\s+web[^\}]+\}\}
- where
"name"
is the reference name
- where
- replace:
$1{{cite web |...}}
- where
...
is the full content of replacement{{cite web}}
template
- where
- find:
- No doubt, this could be optimize but should should work as a starting point. If the
{{cite web}}
template contains another template, this regex will fail. - —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:06, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's better to use
[^\{\}]+
instead of[^\}]+
in cases like this. That way, if the template you're replacing does contain a nested template, the regex doesn't do anything, instead of replacing the wrong things and breaking stuff. SiBr4 (talk) 14:19, 14 October 2015 (UTC)- Thanks for the very quick responses. Yes, the opening reference tag is always in that form. Yes, I will be replacing the template in toto. I do not believe I have any nested templates but I will either use the second suggestion for code or watch carefully.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:44, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I tried it and it worked (at least in the first case). Thanks.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:00, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's better to use
Good news, bad news
The good news is when I set up AWB and ran against the list of World University Game references I got over 50 hits which is about what I expected.
The bad news is that when I tried to repeat for Pan Am games I got only two hits, while expecting over 50. If I had zero hits I would assume I set up something fundamentally wrong but I get two which suggests the format is correct.
An example of my search for string is:
(\<ref\s+name\s*=\s*"2003 Pan Am"\s*\>)\{\{\s*cite\s+web[^\}]+\}\}
The replacement string is:
$1{{cite web|title=Fourteenth Pan American Games -- 2003|date=Feb 20, 2014|url=http://www.usab.com/history/pan-am-womens/fourteenth-pan-american-games-2003.aspx|publisher=USA Basketball| archive-url =https://web.archive.org/web/20150907195503/http://www.usab.com/history/pan-am-womens/fourteenth-pan-american-games-2003.aspx| archive-date =7 September 2015|dead-url=no|accessdate=15 Oct 2015}}
An example of the page in the list is Rebekkah Brunson; the relevant reference is:
<ref name="2003 Pan Am">{{cite web|last=|first=|date=|title=FOURTEENTH PAN AMERICAN GAMES -- 2003|url=http://www.usab.com/womens/panamerican/wpag_2003.html|work=|publisher=USA Basketball|accessdate=15 Oct 2013}}</ref>
I am a REGEX newbie, but I'm not seeing why that search should not find this string.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:38, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- When I put your search and replacement strings into AWB and have it search Rebekkah Brunson, it finds and replaces the middle reference in §References (I did not save). If it isn't broken, I can't fix it. Have you inadvertently set something that you should not have set on the Skip tab? What about the case sensitivity checkbox in Options -> Normal settings?
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 19:45, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Trappist the monk:I'm surely not the first person to ask you to fix something that wasn't broken :) seriously, it is probably user error. I'm encouraged that it worked for you, but I didn't think I did anything unusual in terms of settings.
-
- I took a screenshot of my skip settings File:Temp_AWB_Pan_Am_issues_-_skip_page.JPG and my normal S&R settings File:Temp AWB Pan Am issues - normal settings page.JPG. Does that suggest anything?--S Philbrick(Talk) 20:18, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
-
-
- Sorry, but I think that I'm at a loss to explain why it works for me and not for you. The rule, as you have typed it here, works for me. Was that a direct copy/paste from AWB? Have you tried putting the rule and what it is supposed to find in the AWB Regex tester (Tools->Regex tester)? If that works then the problem is somewhere in your settings. You might save a copy of your settings (File->Save settings [as...]) to a sandbox page so that others can try to duplicate your problem using your settings.
-
-
-
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 21:49, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for your responsiveness. I don't recall whether I copied the rules from AWB or from my sandbox. I'll try using the tester you mentioned. I'll also try starting clean and only using one rule.--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:56, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
-
Resolved@Trappist the monk:I figured out the problem. Some of my "search for" strings had a space character at the end of the string. I guess that means it looks for the citation template followed by a space, which happened only twice. The fact that you could get it to work was a helpful clue. Thanks for looking into this. I now have a few hundred edits to do. Yaay.--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:06, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- Thanks for your responsiveness. I don't recall whether I copied the rules from AWB or from my sandbox. I'll try using the tester you mentioned. I'll also try starting clean and only using one rule.--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:56, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 21:49, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
-
Why do all pages look blank?
Whenever I go to any page, it looks like there is no content in the page at all (i.e. it looks like a blank page). However, when I click "Edit", I see the wikitext. What happened? Gparyani (talk) 18:06, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- Something went wrong with the weekly software update. It was immediately reverted and stuff should get back to normal now. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:08, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I saw this for a moment: File:Missing_text.PNG. I also saw "Due to high database lag, changes newer than 170 seconds may not appear in this list" on Special:MyContributions. Gparyani (talk) 18:10, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- Seems to be effecting User pages in particular. Blethering Scot 18:11, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- I saw this for a moment: File:Missing_text.PNG. I also saw "Due to high database lag, changes newer than 170 seconds may not appear in this list" on Special:MyContributions. Gparyani (talk) 18:10, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- A few minutes ago, I started having the same problem in Google Chrome with the idea lab, which I didn't have an hour earlier. I actually posted this answer from Mozilla Firefox. Blackbombchu (talk) 18:13, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- That problem has already ended for me. Blackbombchu (talk) 18:17, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- A significant number of pages have been cached as blank during the outage. A WP:PURGE will get it back to normal. I've had to do a revert of a vandalism bot once for this, too. Mamyles (talk) 18:15, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) David Godman seems to be affected...was about to use CSD A3 but stopped. Gparyani (talk) 18:16, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for reporting this. This is currently being handled and the corresponding bug report is phab:T115505. As more information on the reasons becomes available that bug report will receive updates. Sorry for the inconvenience! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
- It appears to be affecting every page that has been updated since the problem started. Belarusian presidential election, 2015, EMC Corporation, and Roses Are Red (My Love) are all affected, just to name a few. Portal:Current events also appears completely blank for me.--Tdl1060 (talk) 18:23, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
Follow-up: there is now an incident report. the wub "?!" 11:23, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Phabricator request, please
Would someone please file a Phabricator request and mark it as being of the lowest priority? I've never wandered over there. As you can see in the image, it's possible for the letter at the top of a section to be at the bottom of a column when the rest of the section's on a different column; I'm basically asking for a top-section letter always to be in the same column as the first article link within that section. If this were implemented, the "L" would always be immediately above Lawler's Tavern (not below and to the left), and the "P" would always be with Peninsula Village Historic District. Nyttend (talk) 14:38, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
PS, I'm in the middle of moving a lot of the articles in the pictured category to a subcategory, so things will look different from in the screenshot, although perhaps you can create the same appearance by de-maximizing your browser window. Nyttend (talk) 14:41, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- As it happens, we just published a blogpost on the Wikimedia Blog documenting the process. Perhaps that would be useful? JSutherland (WMF) (talk) 14:57, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- First section here. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:37, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- This is a known issue, that cannot be fixed right now, because browsers don't allow us to control this behavior yet... See phab:T104541 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:39, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- First section here. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:37, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Nyttend: Please feel encouraged to wander over there - everybody is welcome to report a bug and it's not complicated. :) --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 15:23, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Blanked articles
Lately, I've been coming across articles which have been appearing blanked (see Gorseddau Tramway), even though they haven't been blanked. Any idea, what's up with this? GoodDay (talk) 14:22, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- #Why do all pages look blank?. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:27, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- Here's one, I had to fix up. Also, had to fix this. -- GoodDay (talk) 14:31, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- As said at #Why do all pages look blank?, you only have to purge affected pages. Any edit will also do. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:48, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- @PrimeHunter: The Incident Report says all affected pages have been auto-purged. Browser cache issue? - NQ-Alt (talk) 14:51, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- It says "Ori deploys hook to purge blank pages". I don't know whether that was supposed to purge all blank pages and be done by now. The three pages reported here had not been edited for months. I haven't seen blank pages myself for a while. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:07, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- @PrimeHunter: The Incident Report says all affected pages have been auto-purged. Browser cache issue? - NQ-Alt (talk) 14:51, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- As said at #Why do all pages look blank?, you only have to purge affected pages. Any edit will also do. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:48, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- Here's one, I had to fix up. Also, had to fix this. -- GoodDay (talk) 14:31, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Ramanaw mallam
Trying to rename this to Ramanaw Mallam but not allowed, suspect someone's circumvented something here...GrahamHardy (talk) 15:04, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- @GrahamHardy: Salted by Yunshui. You can request removal at WP:RFPP - NQ-Alt (talk) 15:09, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- I have now moved it to Ramanaw Mallam without redirect. De728631 (talk) 15:10, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Disable Visual editor globally
Wikipedia:Help desk#3 questions
mw.user.options.set('visualeditor-enable',0);
in global.js does not seem to disable it anymore. Any ideas? - NQ-Alt (talk) 17:27, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Template help needed (I think)
Please see User_talk:NeilN#Infobox_mystery. --NeilN talk to me 18:09, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- Resolved by SiBr4 and NQ. Thanks! --NeilN talk to me 19:00, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Automated archiving fails
Can anyone see why, for example, Talk:Bengalis, Talk:Crimean status referendum, 2014 and Talk:Charlotte's web (cannabis) are not being automatically archived? they looks to me like they are set up correctly. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:40, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Pigsonthewing: Archive locations changed as a result of subsequent page moves. Hopefully fixed now. [9] [10] [11]- NQ-Alt (talk) 19:15, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- @NQ-Alt: Good catch, thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:23, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Long pages data needs updating
In the absence of User:Snaevar, how can we get Wikipedia:Database reports/Long pages updated? the data there is now around two months old, and very inaccurate. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:19, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- Here you are. Should be the same criteria. If (when) you need an update, just say. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:01, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Edgars2007: Just the job; thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:20, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Edgars2007: I've set up automated arching on most of those pages, which has now run. Could you regenerate the stats, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:12, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- Done. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:26, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Twinkle broken?
In the last view days, I've noticed that Twinkle is mostly broken. I've looked the the archives and found a discussion, but the "solution", turning off Content Translation, did not work. In fact, Content Translation was already turned off in my preferences. I've already cleared my JavaScript file and use [Wikipedia:Twinkle/Preferences], which I haven't done until today. I've also reset my preferences and turned Twinkle back on, but nothing works. TheFarix (talk) 12:46, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Block lengths
An administrator issued a block today, for 59 days. Today being the 19th of a 31 - day month the 19th of November would be 31 days hence, and 28 days further on, making up the 59 days, would bring us to 17 December, since November has 30 days. However, the block notice displayed on - screen when the editor attempts to edit says the block will expire on 18 December. Why the 24 - hour difference? The time at which the block expires is the same time as when the administrator made it.
Also, some administrators do funny blocks such as 2 years, 3 months, 4 hours, 5 minutes, 6 seconds, an orange and a lemon. How does the software handle those? 62.140.210.135 (talk) 15:43, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, it's the 18th. Explained. But I'm still interested in how the odd blocks mentioned are handled. 62.140.210.135 (talk) 15:45, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- How would you know what the block notice says when the blocked editor tries to edit? - NQ-Alt (talk) 15:59, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- Based on what the OP has said it is clear they are User:Vote (X) for Change. I have blocked them for block evasion. HighInBC 16:09, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Where can I go for coding help?
I'm having trouble coding a template for a wiki that uses wikimedia-based markup. All the people I usually ask for help either cannot solve my problem, or are too busy to answer. Where is the appropriate place to go to ask for help with my specific problem?
Thanks, Iustinus (talk) 19:51, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Iustinus: Do you mean it is a Wikimedia wiki, i.e. a wiki run by the Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia? Or is it just a wiki using the same MediaWiki software as wikis of the Wikimedia Foundation? There is a general help desk for MediaWiki at mw:Project:Support desk. At Wikipedia:Help desk you may sometimes find help but can also be told it's only for Wikipedia. We do have Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing which is for anything computer related. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:14, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Tech News: 2015-43
16:02, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Bot borked
Cross posted from here:
Hey, this edit failed to add the nomination link to the article FAC to the talk page, for some reason. I'm not sure how to fix it either, can you take a look? I need it to work so that the Signpost's weekly compilation script works. ResMar 16:27, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Blocked!
Hi all... I just spent about an hour trying to figure out why I had been blocked from editing. It was apparently an IP address block. I couldn't even edit my own talk page. So eventually, I had a brainstorm and rebooted my computer, DSL modem and router, and now I'm back. I'd like to know how to keep this from happening. Is there a FAQ about it? Tfr000 (talk) 22:55, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:IPEXEMPTCONDITIONS NE Ent 23:23, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- Ok, I guess I'm looking for something more than that. The hour was spent trying to append some tag to my talk page (blocked from editing) and filling out some arbitration form (it insisted that I was not blocked, and it would not submit itself). I looked for something else, an email address maybe, and found nothing. What I'm saying is, I followed all the procedures and was defeated. "Unblock Ticket Request Systems" which refuse to help aren't very useful. Tfr000 (talk) 12:22, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- Maybe Help:I have been blocked (this is linked at the bottom of Mediawiki:Blockedtext, the message you see when you try to edit while blocked). In your situation, the IRC channels, pointed to on that page, would probably have been the fastest way to get help. Tip: when you have a problem, copy any messages you get, or take screenshots. It's hard for people to figure out what happened after the fact if you can't provide details. I'm not familiar with the workings of UTRS, but I presume it wouldn't let you submit a request because it didn't see any block against your account (because your account wasn't blocked; the IP address you happened to be using was). This seems to me like a pretty glaring shortfall in UTRS for people accidentally affected by blocks. I don't know if there are technical reasons behind it, but I would suggest someone look into changing that, given that UTRS is one of the places we point people to if they're blocked. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 07:45, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks, however, I'm either not finding or not noticing any IRC channels on either Help:I have been blocked or Mediawiki:Blockedtext. Tfr000 (talk) 22:14, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- Oh, sorry, it's in the last section, which is collapsed by default. If you click/tap/whatever "show" it'll appear, or you can just go to Wikipedia:IRC for a bunch more information on the IRC channels. Anyone else think the sections on Help:I have been blocked don't need to be collapsible? --71.119.131.184 (talk) 20:55, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- Ok, I guess I'm looking for something more than that. The hour was spent trying to append some tag to my talk page (blocked from editing) and filling out some arbitration form (it insisted that I was not blocked, and it would not submit itself). I looked for something else, an email address maybe, and found nothing. What I'm saying is, I followed all the procedures and was defeated. "Unblock Ticket Request Systems" which refuse to help aren't very useful. Tfr000 (talk) 12:22, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Pageview Stats down again
Pageview stats at http://stats.grok.se are down again. Stats have not compiled since October 11. Thus, the following is a summary the datefiles that are currently not compiled.
|
|
|
See update above.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 04:11, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
- Updated.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 02:30, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- Updated.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 19:17, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- Updated.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 04:45, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- List above updated, but stats still down.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:07, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- October 12 and all the old dates remain undone.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 02:51, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Page view statistics
Page view statistics only shows up to October 11, 2015. --Jax 0677 (talk) 16:30, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- It is still not working. Please repair it, it is now a week behind. Johnsmith2116 (talk) 23:51, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- See thread above.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 04:54, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Obviously this has become a critical issue for more than just a few users. Is there any work on addressing the issue? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dstone1029 (talk • contribs) 14:27, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Page view stats
It has been pointed out multiple times here that the page view stats function is down, and has not reported article views since October 11. User:TonyTheTiger says "updated" or "see thread above". What does that mean? The tool is still not working. Is someone trying to fix this? --MelanieN (talk) 15:08, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- When TonyTheTiger says "Updated" in #Pageview Stats down again, it just means he has updated his own list in that section of dates with no page view stats. Comments like "see thread above" just means there is a related thread earlier on the page. It doesn't imply that thread has a solution. The page view stats at http://stats.grok.se/ is an external tool made by a single volunteer editor User:Henrik who rarely replies to questions or makes edits to Wikipedia. I don't think anyone else knows when he is working on the tool. Note that the tool is not a feature in the MediaWiki software and is not run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The editors of the English Wikipedia have just agreed to add some links to it, notably in MediaWiki:Histlegend which is displayed at top of page histories. The tool uses publicly available data and others could make an alternative tool but I don't know any that work. There was once work on a tool at toollabs:wikiviewstats but I don't know whether there is current work to try to make it operational. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:42, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for the explanation. This is such a valuable tool, it would be good if he shared its management with someone else - since nobody can be available all the time. --MelanieN (talk) 16:08, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- I think I read something about pageview rebuilding (which could be done by WMF) in some of Magnus Manske tools. But maybe I'm wrong. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:12, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for the explanation. This is such a valuable tool, it would be good if he shared its management with someone else - since nobody can be available all the time. --MelanieN (talk) 16:08, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Is not being able to view the stats to see how many views a DYK gets during its allotted slot on the main page a deliberate decision? Mine never get that many but I still liked to see how many views it got and how many others got too. — Calvin999 17:29, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
So, when is this expected to be solved? Its a really important tool.--Makeandtoss (talk) 19:35, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Page view statistics
This tool is not showing any data after October 12, why is that? --Makeandtoss (talk) 13:59, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Makeandtoss: #Pageview Stats down again - NQ-Alt (talk) 14:18, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- See the previous thread "Pageview Stats down again" on this page. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 14:40, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- Does anyone know who did the update?--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 02:52, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- October 12 and many earlier dates continue to be missing. In recent months why has one date been missing until the end of the month? Do we need to save a day to make the numbers what we want at the end of the month?--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 20:36, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
spurious nbsp with infobox cyclist
There seems to be a bug in template:Infobox cyclist wherein if there is a template:Convert nested within, a search for nbsp gives a false positive. For example, a search for nbsp has hits for Annie Ewart, Alison Tetrick, Andrea Dvorak, Ariane Horbach, Richard Lamb, Lauren Komanski, Laura Van Gilder, Claudia Lichtenberg, Allie Dragoo, Sara Mustonen (cyclist), Joël Zangerlé, Chris Froome, and many many more articles with this issue. It is a minor bug, but if a Wikipedian searches for articles with spurious "nbsp" strings, this bug generates a lot of false positives. —Anomalocaris (talk) 16:44, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- nowiki doesn't stop the html character entity for nbsp so this post should be viewed in the wikitext and not the rendered page to see what I talk about. If {{Infobox cyclist|weight = 58 kg}} is entered at Special:ExpandTemplates then it produces code for the infobox followed by [[Category:Pages using infobox cyclist with atypical values for height or weight|W]]<span style="display:none;visibility:hidden;color:transparent;">58 kg</span>. In this ending code, is converted to by Module:Infobox cyclist tracking. I don't know Lua so this is as far as I got. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:58, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- That's mad code. I work on cycling articles a lot and I have never used those values. I can't work out why I would want to. Two things should be done. First, the code should recognise
{{convert}}
. Second, it should stop outputting invisible
elements for no apparent reason. (The code could also usefully be documented, of course...) Relentlessly (talk) 18:14, 19 October 2015 (UTC)span
- Module:Infobox cyclist tracking is made by User:Frietjes. I don't know the background. The issue happens for
{{convert}}
because it places a non-breaking space
between number and unit in the output. This is intentional and in accordance with WP:UNIT. My simplified example shows it is this
which is converted by Module:Infobox cyclist tracking to cause the reported issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:19, 19 October 2015 (UTC)- PrimeHunter: I don't understand where to find your simplified example, but, whatever the requirements of WP:UNIT, this problem is not showing up for other infoboxes such as Template:Infobox professional wrestler, Template:Infobox football biography, and Template:Infobox sportsperson. Interestingly, Template:Infobox golfer, Template:Infobox NFL player, and Template:Infobox ice hockey player all perform Metric/Imperial conversions without being asked. Why aren't these conversions exported to all human infoboxes having height/weight parameters? —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:08, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- My simplified example is {{Infobox cyclist|weight = 58 kg}} in my first post (see the wikitext to see it uses nbsp). I don't know other templates than {{Infobox cyclist}} (via code in Module:Infobox cyclist tracking) which adds non-displayed tracking code like this, but I haven't looked for it. Maybe Frietjes can say why it does it. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:21, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- PrimeHunter: I don't understand where to find your simplified example, but, whatever the requirements of WP:UNIT, this problem is not showing up for other infoboxes such as Template:Infobox professional wrestler, Template:Infobox football biography, and Template:Infobox sportsperson. Interestingly, Template:Infobox golfer, Template:Infobox NFL player, and Template:Infobox ice hockey player all perform Metric/Imperial conversions without being asked. Why aren't these conversions exported to all human infoboxes having height/weight parameters? —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:08, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- Module:Infobox cyclist tracking is made by User:Frietjes. I don't know the background. The issue happens for
- That's mad code. I work on cycling articles a lot and I have never used those values. I can't work out why I would want to. Two things should be done. First, the code should recognise
-
-
-
-
-
- PrimeHunter: I see what you mean. I created User:Anomalocaris/sandbox with your snip of code, and when I display the page source, in addition to everything one would expect, it generates the garbage line
- <p><span style="display:none;visibility:hidden;color:transparent;">58&nbsp;kg</span></p>
- So if a character is passed to {{Infobox cyclist}}, it generates the non-displaying nbsp garbage that is found in a general search. But {{Infobox professional wrestler}} doesn't generate any such garbage line. —Anomalocaris (talk) 23:07, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's not specifically: any format that doesn't match what was expected by the module author will output broken HTML. That includes any use of
{{convert}}
. Relentlessly (talk) 23:14, 19 October 2015 (UTC)- Yes, and I don't know whether there is any parameter value that will avoid the hidden code at the end. The only thing special about
is that the module converts it to&nbsp;
. That's normally a way to display the code for a html character entity in a html document instead of displaying the actual character. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:33, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, and I don't know whether there is any parameter value that will avoid the hidden code at the end. The only thing special about
- It's not specifically: any format that doesn't match what was expected by the module author will output broken HTML. That includes any use of
- PrimeHunter: I see what you mean. I created User:Anomalocaris/sandbox with your snip of code, and when I display the page source, in addition to everything one would expect, it generates the garbage line
-
-
-
-
Read in another language button on mobile Wikipedia showing in Urdu
On my android phone, on Google chrome, when I'm logged in, if I scroll to the bottom of the page on the mobile site, the button that usually says Read in another language says ٻي ٻوليءَ ۾ پڙهو instead. I looked on Google translate and this is apparently Urdu, although it couldn't translate what it said. I haven't changed my language settings and it doesn't say this when I'm logged out, so I was just wandering why this is happening. Thanks. Seagull123 Φ 19:37, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's in Sindhi language which Google Translate doesn't know. MediaWiki:Mobile-frontend-language-article-heading/sd displays it so it must mean "Read in another language" like MediaWiki:Mobile-frontend-language-article-heading. I don't know why you see it. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:09, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- @PrimeHunter: Thank you. Google translate isn't the most accurate translator out there is it? But it isn't really bothering me, I was just curious why randomly, it would use Sindhi language for just one part of the page. Thanks again. Seagull123 Φ 22:55, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- I also use Google Translate. When it failed to translate I suspected that Urdu was a wrong guess so I did a Google search on the string. This revealed it was probably a language with code sd, and I found the string at MediaWiki:Mobile-frontend-language-article-heading/sd – which is a MediaWiki default and therefore not searchable in the MediaWiki namespace. I knew to look there because https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example?uselang=qqx displays "(mobile-frontend-language-article-heading)" in the location where normal mobile pages say "Read in another language", at least for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:41, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- @PrimeHunter: Thank you. Google translate isn't the most accurate translator out there is it? But it isn't really bothering me, I was just curious why randomly, it would use Sindhi language for just one part of the page. Thanks again. Seagull123 Φ 22:55, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Strange breakage when editing a category
I went to Category:Immediate children/Tritylodontidae with the intention of adding {{db-catempty}}
, but on clicking "edit this page", I got the screen as shown here. Ignore the pale blue backgrounds to two tabs: that's custom CSS because of my eyesight. But why is the puzzleball inside the border, why are the top menu and tabs pushed down, where are the sidebar links - in fact, why is it such a mess? And where does that text "The page that you are currently viewing contains information ..." (and the table below it) come from? --Redrose64 (talk) 21:08, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- I think, some editnorice contains {{Taxonomy key}}. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 21:28, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- That's the actual Indeed. It comes from {{Immediate children category}} due to {{Editnotices/Namespace/Category}}. Template talk:Automatic taxobox might be a place to discuss its layout. DMacks (talk) 22:07, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- I was previewing the fix when Legoktm beat me to the save.[21] PrimeHunter (talk) 22:37, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- That's the actual Indeed. It comes from {{Immediate children category}} due to {{Editnotices/Namespace/Category}}. Template talk:Automatic taxobox might be a place to discuss its layout. DMacks (talk) 22:07, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Favicon
In Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 10, visited Wikipedia pages show a piece of paper with a folded corner rather than the Wikipedia favicon in the browsing history. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 22:22, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- Is this happening for anyone else in IE11 on Windows 10? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- It's working fine for me. Rchard2scout (talk) 10:57, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting
Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting normal contents has fewer than 300 entries, of which mostly are drafts which I ignore. Yesterday it suddenly started lots of entries, and they are articles which haven't had edits for weeks. I think it's still going up – current 8,700+ entries. What happens? Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Tue 17:08, wikitime= 09:08, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- Is this due to phab:T114898, perhaps? Relentlessly (talk) 09:18, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- It happened since yesterday (Oct 19). Since working – current now 9200–ish Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Tue 18:18, wikitime= 10:18, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- The category may have started being filled since yesterday but around the 9 October I noticed articles that hadn't previously been displaying ref errors were suddenly adorned with red warnings? I know there are other articles that are not (yet) appearing in that category that still have errors showing. SagaciousPhil - Chat 10:30, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- Most probably it's the new cite error. See also here. Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:41, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- The category may have started being filled since yesterday but around the 9 October I noticed articles that hadn't previously been displaying ref errors were suddenly adorned with red warnings? I know there are other articles that are not (yet) appearing in that category that still have errors showing. SagaciousPhil - Chat 10:30, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- It happened since yesterday (Oct 19). Since working – current now 9200–ish Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Tue 18:18, wikitime= 10:18, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- I'll wait. Instead I'll use wikidata. Oh no, that's broken too! I'll go for a shower then lunch! Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Tue 18:54, wikitime= 10:54, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- I don't know what you usually do with the category but you could consider working on the new cite error. The error is supposed to say:
- Invalid
<ref>
tag; name "$1" defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
-
- However, the code for "Display 'cite_error_references_duplicate_key' next to the affected ref" at phab:T114898 moved the error message to a place where the help link is not displayed for some reason. Can somebody help with that? To see the difference, compare cache:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._J._Abdul_Kalam#References (currently cached 19. Oct 2015 17:06:55 GMT, error message displayed after references and has help link) to the current rendering of that revision [22] (error message displayed at reference 12 without help link). The message is made by MediaWiki:Cite error references duplicate key which calls {{Broken ref}}. The help link is added in Template:Broken ref/lang. It works for other cite error messages, for example MediaWiki:Cite error references no text in [23]. Maybe it should be reported at phab. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:04, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- I try to mend Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting entries. If there a couple of dozen a day, then I try to mend then. If 10,800+ then I wouldn't if try.
Error message is Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "$1" defined multiple times with different content (see the ). I.e. "$1" works, but end is (see the ). without any parameter. Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Tue 21:37, wikitime= 13:37, 20 October 2015 (UTC)- The problem is not about omission of a parameter but about stripping of wikilinks. For testing I have added a simple unpiped link directly in the message [24]. The added code says
(see [[Help:Cite errors/Cite error references duplicate key]])
, but the rendering of a page built after the change [25] only says "(see )" in that location. There is no sign of the link or link text in the html of the rendered page which just says(see )
. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:27, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- The problem is not about omission of a parameter but about stripping of wikilinks. For testing I have added a simple unpiped link directly in the message [24]. The added code says
- The error message is accidentally being parsed twice (or perhaps once-and-a-half), which causes this behavior. Sorry about it. phab:T116149. Matma Rex talk 12:02, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- This should be resolved now. Pages might continue to display the broken message until they are purged. Matma Rex talk 15:27, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for the fast fix. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:31, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- Does the 32,000+ entries in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting going to get them remove? If it takes me say 30 a day, it will take me more until my 100th birthday to clear, if I last that long. Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Fri 04:55, wikitime= 20:55, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Now that there is a way to track the errors, I hope somebody will make a tool to help fix them. In most cases I have examined manually, it is the same references with small variations in the reference text. Those references should be merged. It may be hard for a bot to decide but I would like a semi-automated tool where you see two reference texts with the same name and can decide whether to merge using the first text, merge using the second text, or assign different ref names to them. Sometimes there are more than two reference texts with the same name and it may get more cimplicated. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:00, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- If the ref name is invoked and two definitions are given different names then there is also the problem of which version to use in invocations. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:09, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- What I've seen is that, frequently, the cause of this in articles using sfn is an sfn template missing
p=
for one page reference. For example, a single{{sfn|Solomon|2011|2}}
when other references are properly formatted like{{sfn|Solomon|2011|p=3}}
. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:43, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- What I've seen is that, frequently, the cause of this in articles using sfn is an sfn template missing
- This should be resolved now. Pages might continue to display the broken message until they are purged. Matma Rex talk 15:27, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- I try to mend Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting entries. If there a couple of dozen a day, then I try to mend then. If 10,800+ then I wouldn't if try.
- However, the code for "Display 'cite_error_references_duplicate_key' next to the affected ref" at phab:T114898 moved the error message to a place where the help link is not displayed for some reason. Can somebody help with that? To see the difference, compare cache:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._J._Abdul_Kalam#References (currently cached 19. Oct 2015 17:06:55 GMT, error message displayed after references and has help link) to the current rendering of that revision [22] (error message displayed at reference 12 without help link). The message is made by MediaWiki:Cite error references duplicate key which calls {{Broken ref}}. The help link is added in Template:Broken ref/lang. It works for other cite error messages, for example MediaWiki:Cite error references no text in [23]. Maybe it should be reported at phab. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:04, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
References
- ^ Solomon & 2011 2.
- ^ Solomon 2011, p. 3.
I want to reuse a photo in another Wikipedia article
The photo appears in Flat Rock Historic District but when I copy from the infobox exactly to St. John in the Wilderness (Flat Rock, North Carolina), or at least when I believe I do, I get "invalid designation".— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 14:07, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- Fixed The left-hand vertical bar on the template was missing, possible during the copy. It's fine now. — Maile (talk) 14:14, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 14:15, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Patrolling my new creations
About a year ago, I created Forty-fifth State and several dozen similar redirects, and ONUnicorn has helpfully patrolled most or all of them in the last few minutes. Why is patrolling possible for these pages? I'm an administrator, and I was an administrator when these pages were created; aren't my creations autopatrolled? Nyttend (talk) 16:14, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- Someone has nominated all those redirects for deletion. For some odd reason, whenever a redirect is nominated for deletion, it shows up in the new pages feed as an unpatrolled new article. I occasionally go through the new pages feed and mark them all as patrolled just to get them off the feed so that actual new articles are easier to find.
You may want to comment on the RFD discussion.~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 16:17, 20 October 2015 (UTC)- You already did comment I see. So never mind that part. But yeah; changing a redirect into an article, DAB page, or nominating it for deletion adds it to the new pages feed. Annoyingly, it adds it as of the date it was originally created, so those of us who work from the back of the feed forward find ourselves dealing with former redirects first instead of the oldest actual new articles. It's quick and easy to go through and check patrolled on all the redirects that have been nominated for deletion and makes it easier to see what's actually on the new pages feed that needs attention, and that's what I was doing. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 16:20, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- See phab:T92621: "Implement addition of un-redirected pages to Special:NewPages and Special:NewPagesFeed". When we nominate a redirect for deletion, we break the redirect. The software doesn't care and would have a hard time telling exactly what happened to a redirect. It just sees it's no longer a redirect. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:36, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
This isn't really a bug. It's to stop vandals/COI pushers getting around new page patrol by creating redirects and then editing them into articles (or worse, editing other people's redirects into articles). --ais523 20:59, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Blacklisted…
Website [now hidden in the code screen...] is blacklisted, at least since this edit in 2013. I’d like to find out, why. But the website is not mentioned on MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. I’ve tried searching for it on Wikimedia’s Spam blacklist but that list seems not organized in any way so it is quite impossible to search in it—especially if you also want to find out exactly when (and why) a specific website was added to that list. --Corriebertus (talk) 09:11, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Corriebertus: MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist#www.kavkazcenter.com - NQ-Alt (talk) 09:20, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks. --Corriebertus (talk) 10:32, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Give out Deletion to Quality Awards and log at Hall of Fame
Please see Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Give_out_Deletion_to_Quality_Awards.
A one-time-run would be totally acceptable here.
Is there any way either a bot or someone with a user script or automated or semi-automated skills, can help out here ?
Thank you,
— Cirt (talk) 09:22, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Urgent request: unblock IP address for training session
Hello! I am doing a training session at the Africa School of Excellence in Tsakane in Gauteng, South Africa. We are about to get a few children to register from this IP address. Please can someone unlock the IP restriction for the next 5 hours. You can block it again thereafter. I have done this before, but I am not sure of the correct procedure. Thanks!! Isla Haddow (talk) 06:14, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- You will have to tell us the IP address, or the block message that comes up. The correct procedure is probably to request at WP:AN. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 07:07, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! I have asked at the admin page. Here is the IP address just in case: 41.147.55.76 Isla Haddow (talk) 07:54, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
-
-
- @Islahaddow: I am not sure which "IP restriction" this refers to. Account creation throttle? Or is editing blocked from that IP in general? If this is about account creation, see meta:Mass account creation#Requesting temporary lift of IP cap. If the event is about to start, you could go to the IRC channel #wikimedia-tech on Freenode IRC and ask for help (general information on using IRC). --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 12:19, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- It does seen unnecessarily complex- and leaves the trainer with a room full of excited individuals, and can't start because they can't save. The start of a training session usually starts by sorting out incompatible browsers so the trainer already has a credibility problem. Can we apply our minds to making the system more trainer friendly while keeping it secure. I am thinking of two scenarios- the prepared and publicised session, and the impromptu session where an average user just says to guys in the office- '..Look Wikipedia is really easy, we'ĺl pop over to Wetherspoons and I'll show you...'. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 12:40, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- @ClemRutter: "Sorting out incompatible browsers" sounds interesting, would you have an example (browser, browser version, a functionality/action that did not work as expected) to share? As Wikimedia sites run the MediaWiki software in its latest version, mw:Compatibility#Browser support matrix lists browser support levels. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:47, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Always IE and probably 7- the point is on a training course the host will bring out a collection of 'retired' laptops from the store- these will have an have been set up by their tech support with a corporate software image years ago. With austerity- nothing is thrown out, and IT support is a thing of the past. A rule of thumb is: If the page title of an assessed article appears in Black- then there is no Javascript- and the editor will not work fully, specifically I can't get at the Cite templates. So we quickly look for Opera, Firefox, Chrome-- and assess what level of functionality is available there. Then we make do. Does that help? -- Clem Rutter (talk) 12:18, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- @ClemRutter: "Sorting out incompatible browsers" sounds interesting, would you have an example (browser, browser version, a functionality/action that did not work as expected) to share? As Wikimedia sites run the MediaWiki software in its latest version, mw:Compatibility#Browser support matrix lists browser support levels. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:47, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for your thoughts and help ... I agree Clem Rutter, the process does seem unnecessarily complex and opaque, and ultimately frustrating. I would be very keen for there to be a clear process that leads from all the "training" resources, so that the scrabbling doesn't have to happen when you are actually at the place, and can identify the IP that needs unblocking. AKlapper (WMF), the IP restriction was for mass account creation - and I couldn't find that meta page, not matter how hard I tried. But I have it now, and will use it in future. Thanks!! Isla Haddow (talk) 07:32, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Citation error
Back in February, this edit created a citation error in Assassination of John F. Kennedy: "Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "FOOTNOTEStokes19792" defined multiple times with different content (see the help page)." The current version still contains the error. It appears to me that various citation were moved around but not changed, so I cannot understand what created the error. I don't even see "FOOTNOTEStokes19792" in the article as a reference name. Thoughts? Thanks! - Location (talk) 13:41, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Those errors arose because there were two version of the
{{sfn}}
template pointing differently to the same page in the source:{{sfn|Stokes|1979|p=2}}
{{sfn|Stokes|1979|pp=2}}
- which get translated to this:
<ref name="FOOTNOTEStokes19792">[[#CITEREFStokes1979|Stokes 1979]], p. 2.</ref>
<ref name="FOOTNOTEStokes19792">[[#CITEREFStokes1979|Stokes 1979]], pp. 2.</ref>
- Same name, different content.
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:53, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- I have added this case to the help page.[26] PrimeHunter (talk) 14:18, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks again! - Location (talk) 15:27, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- This bug persisted at LNWR Lady of the Lake Class from 29 May 2014 until just now, through 10 edits by 6 unique registered editors, and none of them solved it until now. Editors who apparently didn't know how to fix it include User:Redrose64, an Administrator who now ranks 201 in Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits, and User:Peter Horn, an Autopatrolled Reviewer who now ranks 629 in the same list. I studied the problem for a long time and was completely stumped, and was going to report it on this page when by coincidence User:Location happened to report the same bug. User:PrimeHunter, thank you for adding to the help page, but that is not an adequate solution, because from the article that brought me here we know this bug stumps major wikipedians. The real solution is perhaps that
|p=
and|pp=
should be name-mangled differently in constructing ref names. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:55, 23 October 2015 (UTC)- @Anomalocaris: It is not true that "this bug persisted at LNWR Lady of the Lake Class from 29 May 2014 until just now, through 10 edits by 6 unique registered editors", nor is it true that I "apparently didn't know how to fix it". This is because the MediaWiki software did not have means for detecting such problems until very recently, no earlier than 8 October 2015, and certainly no later than 04:41, 13 October 2015 - I think that PrimeHunter (talk · contribs) knows when it actually went live. People didn't start talking about it at Help talk:Cite errors until until 19:52, 18 October 2015 (UTC) Only two edits have been made to that article since then - both by the same person. Similarly with Assassination of John F. Kennedy, where the first edit that was not vandalism (or reversion of that) since the error message went live was on 15 October 2015. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:47, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- There are more details at phab:T114898. The patch was merged on 18 October, according to the Phabricator task. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:13, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- That Phab task concerns pages that lack a
<references />
tag. This thread is about pages with a<references />
tag, where the message has been displayed since no later than 04:41, 13 October 2015. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:17, 23 October 2015 (UTC)- The relevant task is phab:T85386 - NQ-Alt (talk) 09:18, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Ah yes, you're right. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:25, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Judging by what Matma Rex (talk · contribs) wrote on Wed, Oct 7, 2:54 PM, this went live with MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.2 which was rolled out to English Wikipedia on Thursday, 8 October 2015 - just over two weeks ago. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:48, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Ah yes, you're right. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:25, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- The relevant task is phab:T85386 - NQ-Alt (talk) 09:18, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- That Phab task concerns pages that lack a
- @Redrose64: Thank you for the clarification on when the bug was introduced. I still believe it should be a high priority to fix the bug and not just warn people about it. —Anomalocaris (talk) 15:44, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Anomalocaris, if I understand correctly, what happened was not the "introduction of a bug" but rather the introduction of detection logic for existing errors or at best dangerous practices. (If a two refs define cites use the same name but neither is ever referred to by name (no
<ref name=ABC />
is present) then no actual problem occurs, but it is an error waiting to happen, and so an error is now reported for this case along with other cases where the same ref name is defined twice. This wiki-coding mistake was common but rarely detected as there was no easy way to notice it, only a through review of all named refs in the wiki-code would have found it. Now it produces a large red error message and the accumulated errors must be fixed one-by-one. I have already fixed a few. I don't see how any system-level code change could cure these long-existing wiki-coding errors. DES (talk) 16:11, 23 October 2015 (UTC)- User:DESiegel: I fixed LNWR Lady of the Lake Class by changing an occurrence of {{sfn|Nock|1952|p=47–48}} to {{sfn|Nock|1952|pp=47–48}} so that both forms would not exist together in the article. It is improper formatting to use
|p=
with multiple pages or|pp=
with single pages, but that's beside the point. The bug is that if an article happens to have two {{sfn}} templates identical except that one uses|p=
and one uses|pp=
, a ludicrous, difficult-to-diagnose error message is generated. I fail to see how LNWR Lady of the Lake Class as it existed prior to my fix, and prior to the introduction of the bug that made the error message show up in the first place, is "an error waiting to happen". —Anomalocaris (talk) 16:55, 23 October 2015 (UTC)- The new error message correctly warns if a ref name is defined twice with different content. The software has always ignored and still ignores the second definition, and displays the first definition for both references. In some cases the two references are completely different and it's a big error to ignore the second definition so a warning is good there. In other cases the two definitons are about the same source but use different wording. In such cases it matters less. The error message cannot be expected to determine whether the error is important or not, and it cannot detect whether the error comes from a template with the way MediaWiki works. If there are two identical definitions of a ref name then the error message is not produced.
{{sfn|Nock|1952|p=47–48}}
produces<ref name="FOOTNOTENock195247–48">[[#CITEREFNock1952|Nock 1952]], p. 47–48.</ref>
, while{{sfn|Nock|1952|pp=47–48}}
produces<ref name="FOOTNOTENock195247–48">[[#CITEREFNock1952|Nock 1952]], pp. 47–48.</ref>
. The two definitions of "FOOTNOTENock195247–48" say respectively "p." and "pp." where the second definition with "pp." will be ignored, so the error message is correctly generated. The difference is minor but an automated error message cannot, and probably should not, ignore errors just because they seem minor to a human. If you want {{sfn}} to produce different ref names in the two cases, or to check whether p= is inappropriately used with an interval or pp= with a single page, then you can post a suggestion to Template talk:Sfn. A correct error message should not be removed everywhere just because some occurrences of it are caused by a template which could be improved. However, the error message should maybe be made less visually dominant. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:37, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- The new error message correctly warns if a ref name is defined twice with different content. The software has always ignored and still ignores the second definition, and displays the first definition for both references. In some cases the two references are completely different and it's a big error to ignore the second definition so a warning is good there. In other cases the two definitons are about the same source but use different wording. In such cases it matters less. The error message cannot be expected to determine whether the error is important or not, and it cannot detect whether the error comes from a template with the way MediaWiki works. If there are two identical definitions of a ref name then the error message is not produced.
- User:DESiegel: I fixed LNWR Lady of the Lake Class by changing an occurrence of {{sfn|Nock|1952|p=47–48}} to {{sfn|Nock|1952|pp=47–48}} so that both forms would not exist together in the article. It is improper formatting to use
- Anomalocaris, if I understand correctly, what happened was not the "introduction of a bug" but rather the introduction of detection logic for existing errors or at best dangerous practices. (If a two refs define cites use the same name but neither is ever referred to by name (no
- There are more details at phab:T114898. The patch was merged on 18 October, according to the Phabricator task. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:13, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Anomalocaris: It is not true that "this bug persisted at LNWR Lady of the Lake Class from 29 May 2014 until just now, through 10 edits by 6 unique registered editors", nor is it true that I "apparently didn't know how to fix it". This is because the MediaWiki software did not have means for detecting such problems until very recently, no earlier than 8 October 2015, and certainly no later than 04:41, 13 October 2015 - I think that PrimeHunter (talk · contribs) knows when it actually went live. People didn't start talking about it at Help talk:Cite errors until until 19:52, 18 October 2015 (UTC) Only two edits have been made to that article since then - both by the same person. Similarly with Assassination of John F. Kennedy, where the first edit that was not vandalism (or reversion of that) since the error message went live was on 15 October 2015. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:47, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- I have added this case to the help page.[26] PrimeHunter (talk) 14:18, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
I want to draw attention to this edit at the help desk. This seems to be a case in which {{sfn}} is supposed to produce two identical ref names with slightly different content (one supporting a postscript). I'm not sure if there is any way for the error msg generation logic to detect this case, or what can be done to fix the calls to sfn to avoid the error message. Advice would be welcome. DES (talk) 20:36, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- DES, that's a great example showing the need to fix {{sfn}}. User:PrimeHunter: I agree that if a ref name is defined twice with different content, there should be an error message. I simply say that it is incorrect for {{sfn}} to take two different parameter sets and mangle them to the same ref name. As an additional example of what could go wrong, suppose we have two books, both written by authors named Nock, one in 198 and one in 1989.
{{sfn|Nock|198|p=97}}
produces<ref name="FOOTNOTENock19897">[[#CITEREFNock198|Nock 198]], p. 97.</ref>
, while {{sfn|Nock|1989|p=7}} produces<ref name="FOOTNOTENock19897">[[#CITEREFNock1989|Nock 1989]], p. 7.</ref>
. {{sfn}} needs to be rewritten so that calls to this template with different parameters don't mangle to the same ref name. —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:45, 23 October 2015 (UTC)-
- Of course one call to {{sfn}} can't know what other calls there might be on the same page. The case Anomalocaris mentions above could be handled if sfn output a ref name such as FOOTNOTENock1989_7 for one case and FOOTNOTENock198_97 for the other. Alternatively, this fairly rare case (we don't have many articles citing two sources 1000 years apart with identical author names) could be handled just as we handle Smith, John and Smith, Jane both with works in 2002. One is dated as 2002a. If the older source is cited as
{{sfn|Nock|198a|p=97}}
, the issue does not occur. None of this would fix the ps case, however. DES (talk) 21:13, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Of course one call to {{sfn}} can't know what other calls there might be on the same page. The case Anomalocaris mentions above could be handled if sfn output a ref name such as FOOTNOTENock1989_7 for one case and FOOTNOTENock198_97 for the other. Alternatively, this fairly rare case (we don't have many articles citing two sources 1000 years apart with identical author names) could be handled just as we handle Smith, John and Smith, Jane both with works in 2002. One is dated as 2002a. If the older source is cited as
- This is not something that
{{sfn}}
can fix. The template cannot see outside itself. I does not know that any other{{sfn}}
templates exist. I suppose that it is possible to add a parameter that would instruct MediaWiki to ignore this one{{sfn}}
template but , as it stands,{{sfn}}
(and the{{harv}}
templates) is not broken. - —Trappist the monk (talk) 20:54, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- From what I read here, the only solution for the particular case seems to replace the subsequent occurences of {{sfn}} with
<ref name="FOOTNOTEAuthorYearPage"/>
, if I want them to point to the same note without retyping the long quote inps=
parameter. Is it correct? However, this solution will only work, as long as the format of ref names generated by sfn does not change. As Anomalocaris argues for changing this format, I guess it will not stay like this for long. Is any permanent solution possible? --Off-shell (talk) 21:01, 23 October 2015 (UTC)- The whole point about
{{sfn}}
is that you shouldn't need to use the<ref name="..." />
syntax (in fact you shouldn't need to use any form of<ref>
tag) - and you shouldn't need to worry about the ref name either. Any change to the way that{{sfn}}
works should be discussed at Template talk:sfn, not here. We spent some time in getting it to work satisfactorily and predictably; it has been stable for two and a half years now. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:54, 23 October 2015 (UTC)- Unfortunately it does not work anymore the way it worked before. If it should help, I will repost my question at Template talk:sfn. --Off-shell (talk) 23:08, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) Quite true, Redrose64 an editor using {{sfn}} in accordance with its documentation shouldn't need to worry about how it works internally. And considered on its own, it works just fine. But now its interaction with the new cite error detection logic reveals that in some cases sfn produces ref names that worked, but technically broke the documented interface, or at least violated the best practices, unless I have misunderstood things. Makign two sfn calls to the same source, one using the ps= parameter, and one not (as recommended in the sfn docs) produces two ref names with non-identical content -- as it must for sfn to work as it is documented to do in regard to ps=. In this case the "error" of producing two identical ref names is harmless, but there is no obvious way to tell the error detecing logic that. Perhaps if that logic simply ignored all ref names that start with "FOOTNOTE"? Its not a likely human-generated name for a ref, and sfn (and other tempaltes that emit or react to these refs) could be edited to use a less likely string instead -- all behind the scenes. That might also stop the p vs pp error reports, which are a bit hard to track down. I suppose sfn could be made to detect if pp is used with a single page number and issue a more helpful error message. No doubt before this it seemed harmless or at least not worth the effort of detecting.
- But in acy case we do need to address the interaction of sfn and the new logic, to avoid problems such as those reported above, with sfn using ps. DES (talk) 23:10, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Here is a proposal for the next software version: Define an additional optional parameter for the ref tag, e.g.
check=no
, which will explicitely exclude the tag from the content check. Then add an equivalent parameter to the harv/sfn(p) templates, e.g.{{sfn|Author|Year|check=no}}
.--Off-shell (talk) 23:27, 23 October 2015 (UTC)-
- (edit conflict)A good idea, but as I understand it, by the time the error check code is operating, any such detail has already been stripped from the ref name. To change the processing to pass such a parameter through to where it is needed would be a much more basic change, would require re-working of the entire ref-handling sub-system and a matching level of testing, in short a much larger change than telling the error detecting code to simply ignore ref names that match a specific pattern. DES (talk) 23:38, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- Template:Sfn#Additional comments or quotes: .7Cps= encourages users to enter parameters where the template will produce the same ref name with different definitions. The feature deliberately relies on the second and later definitions being ignored. See xkcd Workflow. {{sfn}} or its documentation should be changed to get rid of this feature. If there are many uses then maybe a bot could be coded to clean them up. sfn could add a parameter to indicate it isn't the first use for that reference. In such cases it could produce
<ref name="FOOTNOTEAuthorYearPage"/>
to invoke another definition (unfortunately this will fail if there isn't actually another definition). Currently it produces something like<ref name="FOOTNOTEAuthorYearPage">definition2</ref>
, where definition2 will be different from the other definition if they don't have the sameps=
. In theory, MediaWiki:Cite error references duplicate key could be coded to detect "typical sfn output" in the ref name and omit the error message in that case. One of the problems with this hack is that users with other interface languages in preferences would still get the error message, unless we also make a similar MediaWiki:Cite error references duplicate key/xx for their language. Another problem is that other Wikimedia wikis often copy our templates, but they may not have a self-destructing error message. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:32, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Here is a proposal for the next software version: Define an additional optional parameter for the ref tag, e.g.
- I think that there is value in detecting and showing differences in the content of named references. Simply ignoring any
<ref name="FOOTNOTE...">
I don't know that it's possible for MediaWiki to know that{{sfn|Author|year|ps=text}}
should link to a citation that is also linked to by a{{sfn|Author|year}}
. Following up on what I wrote before, we could add an|mwignore=true
parameter to{{sfn}}
which then would render it like this:{{sfn/sandbox|Author|2006|p=34|mwignore=true}}
<ref mwignore="true" name="FOOTNOTEAuthor200634">[[#CITEREFAuthor2006|Author 2006]], p. 34.</ref>
- I hacked Module:Footnotes/sandbox to set
mwignore="true"
just to see what happens. MediaWiki emits a too many names error so that would need to be fixed at MediaWiki also.
-
- But that isn't a good solution either. The defined problem is two
{{sfn}}
templates pointing to the same citation and the same page or location but one has|ps=some text
and the other does not. MediaWiki builds a link between the article text and the{{reflist}}
where the{{sfn}}
result is rendered. The link between the subscript and the{{sfn}}
is by the<ref name="FOOTNOTE...">
tag. If we create a new parameter for{{sfn}}
that appends an identifier to the end of thename="..."
value then the name is unique and MediaWiki doesn't choke on it and the{{sfn}}
links are the same pointing to the same citation. The identifier could be any text. So, then:{{sfn/sandbox|Author|2006|p=34|id=a}}
<ref name="FOOTNOTEAuthor200634a">[[#CITEREFAuthor2006|Author 2006]], p. 34.</ref>
- For each unique quote on page 34 of Author 2006, use a different identifier.
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:53, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- But that isn't a good solution either. The defined problem is two
- The whole point about
-
Here is a sandboxed version of this possible solution
- Some nonsense.[1]
{{sfn/sandbox|Stokes|1979|p=2|ps=. A long and tedious quote of little import}}
- Same as #4.[2]
{{sfn/sandbox|Stokes|1979|p=2|id=a}}
- Different nonsense from the nonsense in #1.[3]
{{sfn/sandbox|Stokes|1979|p=2|id=b|ps=. And another bit of drivel}}
- Same as #4.[2]
{{sfn/sandbox|Stokes|1979|p=2|id=a}}
- Link to #1 reference.[1]
{{sfn/sandbox|Stokes|1979|p=2|name-only=yes}}
- Some more nonsense.[4]
<ref name="quote in short ref">{{harvnb|Stokes|1979|p=2}}. A restatement of the long and tedious quote of little import.</ref>
- Same cite as at #6 without retyping the quote.[4]
<ref name="quote in short ref" />
References
- ^ a b Stokes 1979, p. 2. A long and tedious quote of little import
- ^ a b Stokes 1979, p. 2.
- ^ Stokes 1979, p. 2. And another bit of drivel
- ^ a b Stokes 1979, p. 2. A restatement of the long and tedious quote of little import.
- Stokes (1979). Nothing worth reading here.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:09, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
-
-
-
-
- So if I understand it correctly,
mwignore="true"
is what I meant bycheck=no
above. Your 2nd solution with id parameter means that another footnote is produced, and if I really want to refer to the same footnote, I have to copy the whole text in ps parameter. What about this alternative: provide an option for {{sfn}} telling it to generate a bare reference<ref name="..."/>
. Compared to writing<ref ...>
directly, the advantage is that I don't need to know how the ref name is constructed by sfn and the name will automatically be adjusted, if the sfn code changes. But this will be the responsibility of the editor to ensure that the initial reference exists. A deletion of the initial reference will break these ones. A bot may then look at such cases, search for the initial reference in the history of the page, and fill it at the first occurence of such a reference in the current version of the article. --Off-shell (talk) 00:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)- That is possible (item 5 in the list above) though the code produces
<ref name="FOOTNOTEStokes19792_"></ref>
and not<ref name="FOOTNOTEStokes19792_"/>
. A shorter but still meaningful parameter name would be better. The documentation being what it is, does anyone know if it is possible to produce a self-closing tag withframe:extensionTag{}
? - —Trappist the monk (talk) 03:06, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
frame:extensionTag
uses the same code internally as the#tag
parser function. That is, its arguments are passed through to the Cite extension without ever being constructed into an HTML tag string. Also, the Cite extension checks to make sure that<ref name="foo" />
generates the same output as{{#tag:ref||name=foo}}
. If you were substituting, there would be a difference in the wikitext you would get back fromframe:extensionTag('ref', '', {name = 'foo'})
andframe:preprocess('<ref name="foo" />')
, but otherwise usingframe:extensionTag
should work fine. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 07:17, 24 October 2015 (UTC)- The solution with
name-only
would be fine with me. It does not matter for the user how the empty tag is formed by sfn "behind the scenes", as long as the checker treats it in the same way (hopefully it must, according to XML standards). In addition, theid
option is indeed also needed for citing different excerpts from the same source page. So I think both options should be implemented. --Off-shell (talk) 07:25, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- The solution with
- That is possible (item 5 in the list above) though the code produces
- So if I understand it correctly,
-
-
-
Usage of ps= in {{sfn}}
The intent of {{sfn}}
was that you should need no more than six parameters: up to four authors, a year, and any one of |p=
|pp=
|loc=
, and for a long time, those were all that it offered. It seems that in a drive for commonality, its documentation is now shared with {{harvnb}}
etc. which always had a broader range of parameters. It's not necessary to make {{sfn}}
even more complicated with more parameters. In the (rare) cases that a page number is insufficient, the |loc=
parameter provides all you need:
Statement 1.{{sfn|Smith|2015|loc=p. 12, para 1}} Statement 2.{{sfn|Smith|2015|loc=p. 12, para 4}}
If this still isn't accurate enough, and you need to quote something, use <ref>{{harvnb}}</ref>
and put it after the closing double brace. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:40, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- Redrose64, do you suggest to remove the parameter
ps=
completely? I don't see any magic in the number 6. If it were "10 parameters", I would have no problem with that. But if my problem can be solved with the current tools, it would be fine. Could you provide a solution for the particular example from my original request? I make a footnote with a long quote inside it. Later I want to reuse the footnote without copying the quote. --Off-shell (talk) 08:19, 24 October 2015 (UTC)- See items 6 and 7 in my list. It works because an editor can choose a unique name and use the self-closing
<ref name="unique name" />
tag. - —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:25, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- OK, thank you Trappist the monk. In a previous posting above, Redrose64 specifically noted that "the whole point about
{{sfn}}
is that you shouldn't need to use the<ref name="..." />
syntax (in fact you shouldn't need to use any form of<ref>
tag) - and you shouldn't need to worry about the ref name either." The new proposal means in fact the opposite - going back to ref tags. --Off-shell (talk) 21:22, 24 October 2015 (UTC)- Don't try to stretch
{{sfn}}
to do something that it wasn't designed for. The (up to) six parameters that it's normally used with are all combined to make a ref name that is specific to that particular combination, none of the six are ignored. As soon as you start using params that don't contribute towards the ref name, you potentially get exactly the sort of issues that started this off. Ask yourself: "do I really need to give more than author(s), year, and page number?" If so, it's time to look at another way. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:53, 24 October 2015 (UTC)- Redrose64, by that argument the |ps= parameter shouldn't be supported, or should accept only "." and " " (to switch between CS1 and CS2 behavior). But ps= not only permits longer additions, but the documentation explicitly recommends using them for quotes. Should we remove that recommendation, and change all uses of ps= for such purposes to some other citation method? If not, we are luring editors into creating reasonable markup that now displays a nasty erro message which is not easy to track down for those not technically sophisticated and aware of that {{sfn}} does behind the scenes. Personally I don't see why you are so strict about the limiting data passed to sfn to year, author, and page. Many cites, particularly to off-line sources, benefit with a quote -- I might even say most off-line cites should have one. I don't use harvard or sfn style cites much, so perhaps I am missing a nuance. DES (talk) 00:45, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- There are good reasons why the intent of
{{sfn}}
was that all passed-in information should be included in the ref name. Let's assume that your article hasThe design was altered in 2015 at the insistence of the government in order to reduce costs,{{sfn|Smith|2015|p=12|ps="The minister stated that no more money was available"}} originally having been designed to have every luxury imaginable.{{sfn|Smith|2015|p=12}}
- There are good reasons why the intent of
- Redrose64, by that argument the |ps= parameter shouldn't be supported, or should accept only "." and " " (to switch between CS1 and CS2 behavior). But ps= not only permits longer additions, but the documentation explicitly recommends using them for quotes. Should we remove that recommendation, and change all uses of ps= for such purposes to some other citation method? If not, we are luring editors into creating reasonable markup that now displays a nasty erro message which is not easy to track down for those not technically sophisticated and aware of that {{sfn}} does behind the scenes. Personally I don't see why you are so strict about the limiting data passed to sfn to year, author, and page. Many cites, particularly to off-line sources, benefit with a quote -- I might even say most off-line cites should have one. I don't use harvard or sfn style cites much, so perhaps I am missing a nuance. DES (talk) 00:45, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Don't try to stretch
- OK, thank you Trappist the monk. In a previous posting above, Redrose64 specifically noted that "the whole point about
- See items 6 and 7 in my list. It works because an editor can choose a unique name and use the self-closing
References
- ^ a b Smith 2015, p. 12"The minister stated that no more money was available" Cite error: Invalid
<ref>
tag; name "FOOTNOTESmith201512" defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
-
-
-
-
-
- This is out of chronological order so you might rewrite it, interchanging two phrases:
The building was originally designed to have every luxury imaginable,{{sfn|Smith|2015|p=12}} but the design was altered in 2015 at the insistence of the government in order to reduce costs.{{sfn|Smith|2015|p=12|ps="The minister stated that no more money was available"}}
- This is out of chronological order so you might rewrite it, interchanging two phrases:
-
-
-
-
References
- ^ a b Smith 2015, p. 12. Cite error: Invalid
<ref>
tag; name "FOOTNOTESmith201512" defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
-
-
-
-
-
- Both reflists have one ref that has two backlinks. Now ignoring the red error messages, we also notice that the quote is absent from the second ref. Unexpected losses due to a simple reordering of text has been a problem with using
|ps=
ever since it was added to{{sfn}}
- something that was not discussed at Template talk:Sfn but was apparently done so that it would be more like{{harvnb}}
. The{{harvnb}}
template does not have the problem, because it does not construct<ref>...</ref>
tags, and so does not generate a named ref. This is how I would do it:The building was originally designed to have every luxury imaginable,{{sfn|Smith|2015|p=12}} but the design was altered in 2015 at the insistence of the government in order to reduce costs.<ref>{{harvnb|Smith|2015|p=12}}: "The minister stated that no more money was available"</ref>
- Both reflists have one ref that has two backlinks. Now ignoring the red error messages, we also notice that the quote is absent from the second ref. Unexpected losses due to a simple reordering of text has been a problem with using
-
-
-
-
References
- ^ Smith 2015, p. 12.
- ^ Smith 2015, p. 12: "The minister stated that no more money was available"
-
-
-
-
-
- Two refs, one backlink each, one with the quote. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:25, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Very well, Redrose64, that makes some sense. But in that case we need to fix existing uses of |ps= in accord with your example above, and we need to change the documentation on {{sfn}} to stop encouraging this use of the ps= parameter. Ideally we need to change sfn to emit an error message of its own when ps is so used (anything more than a single space or period, perhaps). And for all that we really should have consensus. DES (talk) 16:59, 25 October 2015 (UTC) @Redrose64: DES (talk) 17:19, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Two refs, one backlink each, one with the quote. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:25, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
-
-
-
-
I have been using AWB to find and clean up some of the uses of {{sfn}} with a non-empty ps= parameter. (see my recent contribs.) However, I found a case of the use of {{sfnm}} with multiple quotes in Argentina. I am not sure how this sort of thing should be fixed. Any suggestions? DES (talk) 00:22, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Spaces replaced with underscores in error msg
This was mentioned above. Here is an example (since fixed) of a cite error message showing the offending ref name with underscores, while the actual name uses spaces. This makes searching for the issue in the wiki-text a bit harder, although far from impossible once one realizes the issue. Can the message be modified to convert underscores to spaces for display? Failing that, or perhaps better, cna the help page mention this issue? DES (talk) 15:55, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- The error message should show the reference name as it is in the wiki text. The error detector should not convert underscores to spaces because underscores may legitimately be used in a reference name.
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:04, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- Trappist the monk, from the comments above, and from those in the linked help desk thread, I understood that when this error message is generated, the ref name has already been formatted for use in a URL, which includes converting spaces to underscores, and numeric encoding of special characters (which luckily are rarely used in ref names). While we could convert underscores back to spaces for the message, the previous transformation is lossy, and we can't know what the actual name was at that point. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood? DES (talk) 19:12, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- You would need to ask someone who is familiar with the code that makes the error message. From a user's point of view, as you yourself saw, the existing error message can be less than helpful to the non-technical among us. I suspect that it isn't that difficult to keep the original around until after the error checking is done.
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 19:42, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- There is a suggestion at Help talk:Cite errors#ThisCite error: Invalid .3Cref.3E tag.3B name defined multiple times with different content to change underscores to spaces in the error message here. Spaces are currently converted to underscores by MediaWiki before the error message is called. This can be tested by previewing
<ref name="a b">foo</ref><ref name="a b">bar</ref>
in mainspace. The code for MediaWiki:Cite error references duplicate key currently makes no conversion but just says what was passed to it as $1. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- There is a suggestion at Help talk:Cite errors#ThisCite error: Invalid .3Cref.3E tag.3B name defined multiple times with different content to change underscores to spaces in the error message here. Spaces are currently converted to underscores by MediaWiki before the error message is called. This can be tested by previewing
- Trappist the monk, from the comments above, and from those in the linked help desk thread, I understood that when this error message is generated, the ref name has already been formatted for use in a URL, which includes converting spaces to underscores, and numeric encoding of special characters (which luckily are rarely used in ref names). While we could convert underscores back to spaces for the message, the previous transformation is lossy, and we can't know what the actual name was at that point. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood? DES (talk) 19:12, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Watchlist
Selecting the namespace and then clicking go in the watchlist does not change the URL. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 13:47, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- So what? The watchlist is restricted to the chosen namespace, at least for me in Firefox. I have never seen reason to post a watchlist link others could click to only see a given namespace. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:54, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- I presume, were I the sort, that one might want to put together a bookmark (or several) arranged by namespace. That can't be done if the URL does not change depending on namespace. Which, I'm pretty sure there is a way to manipulate the URL such that you can set up such a bookmark, but it's not user-friendly if you can't access it by doing so in the context of the current watchlist. --Izno (talk) 13:58, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Alternatively, as the task provided notes, a bot (AWB if not a full bot) could manipulate the URL to get a list of articles... etc. --Izno (talk) 14:00, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Not getting notices
Hi to all, earlier today I left a message on a new user's talk page explaining some policies. When I logged back on just now, I went to his page abd saw that he had replied. The problem is that he had linked my name in his reply, and I didn't receive a notice that he had, like I usually do. I use mobile view, so to me any notification appears as a number in a red square at the little bell symbol at the top of the screen. I got a notification yesterday for practically the same thing, but not today. Is anybody else having this? Thanks. White Arabian mare (Neigh) 18:22, 22 October 2015 (UTC)White Arabian mare
- Hi White Arabian mare - Are you referring to this edit? - NQ-Alt (talk) 18:24, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- Yes, that's it. Weirdly, I got your ping just then, but not that one earlier. 😛 White Arabian mare (Neigh) 18:29, 22 October 2015 (UTC)White Arabian mare
- @White Arabian mare: According to Wikipedia:Notifications, for a ping to work properly, the post containing a link to a user page must be signed; if the edit does not add a new signature to the page, no notification will be sent. See the related discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notifications#Why didn't it work? - NQ-Alt (talk) 18:32, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, that's it. Weirdly, I got your ping just then, but not that one earlier. 😛 White Arabian mare (Neigh) 18:29, 22 October 2015 (UTC)White Arabian mare
-
-
-
- Thank you, I have never heard that before. White Arabian mare (Neigh) 18:34, 22 October 2015 (UTC)White Arabian mare
- More at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 133#Missed pings and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 132#Ping notifications working? - NQ-Alt (talk) 18:36, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- And dozens of other threads. Omitted signature is probably the most common reason for failed notification, and the one we get most queries about. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:41, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Redrose64: Might want to add this to this page's editnotice then? Gparyani (talk) 19:20, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- And dozens of other threads. Omitted signature is probably the most common reason for failed notification, and the one we get most queries about. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:41, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- More at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 133#Missed pings and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 132#Ping notifications working? - NQ-Alt (talk) 18:36, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thank you, I have never heard that before. White Arabian mare (Neigh) 18:34, 22 October 2015 (UTC)White Arabian mare
-
-
I thought IPs were unable to create articles
I thought IPs were unable to create articles. But it's happening, for example Lola LC91. Comments? Help? -- Diannaa (talk) 22:52, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Diannaa: they can create talk pages and an eligible user could move them to mainspace. –xenotalk 23:00, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) They can't. They can, however, create pages in Talk: space, which confirmed users may then move to mainspace. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:01, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks, I missed that, -- Diannaa (talk) 23:03, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- For the record, they can also create pages in one non-talk namespace: The Draft namespace. This is more common. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:22, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, I've seen lots of those from my work trying to clear out Category:AfC submissions declined as copyright violations -- Diannaa (talk) 01:35, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- For the record, they can also create pages in one non-talk namespace: The Draft namespace. This is more common. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:22, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks, I missed that, -- Diannaa (talk) 23:03, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Reporting - Category:WikiProject assessments not updating
Greetings: Yesterday I added Category:WikiProject assessments to Wikipedia:WikiProject Catholicism/Assessment. It is still not updated even though I did the purge on both pages. I do not know if something is broken so I all I can do is report the problem here and ask for help. Thanks. JoeHebda (talk) 14:42, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
"Due to high database server lag, changes newer than 44 seconds may not appear in this list."
What causes this message to show up on my contributions list? Gparyani (talk) 19:18, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- If a lot of database writes are done in a short period of time, it can cause lag (some details at database replication). In this case it was phab:T116425. Legoktm (talk) 03:24, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Case sensitivity
The performer field in Special:Log is case sensitive. When you start typing, it will only give suggestions that start with what you type and have matching capitalization. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:02, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's case-insensitive on first letter, which means that it matches the case-sensitivity of user names. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:18, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Sort and prune my watchlist?
Is there a way to sort my watchlist so that I can get it down to a more reasonable size? Firstly to remove all the redlinks and secondly to sort by when last I edited the pages, so I can remove those I have not touched since <date x>. It's rapidly heading towards 20,000 pages, most of which I no longer care about. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 10:39, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- I use the raw watchlist for this purpose.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 11:32, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- That's unfortunately useless, it gives no meaningful information about the items in the list, not even identifying redlinks. It seems the "primitiveness" of watchlists is a perennial issue, I've found quite a few posts like mine dating back years. How difficult is it really to take a watchlist entry, search a user contributions log for the most recent occurrence of the page title and return the diff or even just the timestamp - rinse, repeat, all the way down the list - then sort the output list by the timestamp? It seems on the face of it to be a fairly simple database query operation. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 13:51, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- This is some Javascript I was handed a while ago by someone on Wikidata.
$('#editwatchlist-ns0 .mw-htmlform-flatlist-item').each(function (x, y) { if ($('a:first', y).is('.new')) { y.firstChild.checked = true; } })
- Thanks Izno, unfortunately "executed from the browser console line" is gobbledygook to me. I use Chrome, if that helps. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:19, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Dodger67: In Chrome, when on page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EditWatchlist, use ctrl + shift + i to open the developer tools. Click Console (the right-most tab across the top of the developer box). Paste the above code after the input cursor ">" at the bottom and press enter. Presto, all article-space red links on your watchlist have been selected. Worldbruce (talk) 04:36, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks Izno, unfortunately "executed from the browser console line" is gobbledygook to me. I use Chrome, if that helps. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:19, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Please add this to Special:ActiveUsers article
Please add this to the first sentence of the [[Special:ActiveUsers]] article:
The total number of active editors on the English Wikipedia is [[Special:ActiveUsers|{{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}}]].
- Here is how it renders: The total number of active editors on the English Wikipedia is 128,757.
The number is dynamic on a page refresh, and the number is a clickable wikilink.
The page is locked, and there is no Talk page. This addition would be a great asset to that article. Thank you. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk}
13:28, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- Checkingfax special pages are not articles and have no talk pages. They are part of the Mediawiki software. I'm not sure how hard such a feature would be to add, but it would take a developer to alter the software. What would the link link to, as you visualize it? There is not usually a good reason for a page to link to itself (except for section links). DES (talk) 14:24, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- Actually, we can do it locally: the text at the top of Special:ActiveUsers is defined by MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary and MediaWiki:Activeusers-intro. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 16:20, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- What's the difference between MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary and MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary/en-gb? My WP interface language preference is set to en-English not en-GB-British English. I just made an (unrelated) edit the apparently language-independent file and no change in Special:ActiveUsers result (even with various cache purges), then edited /en-gb and it took effect. DMacks (talk) 17:02, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary affects users with en as language at Special:Preferences, and MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary/en-gb affects en-gb. Your edits were only a minute apart. It sounds like a timing coincidence if your edit to MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary only took effect after the edit to MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary/en-gb. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:12, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- What's the difference between MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary and MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary/en-gb? My WP interface language preference is set to en-English not en-GB-British English. I just made an (unrelated) edit the apparently language-independent file and no change in Special:ActiveUsers result (even with various cache purges), then edited /en-gb and it took effect. DMacks (talk) 17:02, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- Actually, we can do it locally: the text at the top of Special:ActiveUsers is defined by MediaWiki:Activeusers-summary and MediaWiki:Activeusers-intro. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 16:20, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
My bad, DES. Here is my revised suggestion:
Please add this to the first sentence of the [[Special:ActiveUsers]] article:
The total number of active editors on the English Wikipedia is [[Special:ActiveUsers|{{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}}]].
- Here is how it renders: The total number of active editors on the English Wikipedia is 128,757.
The number is dynamic on a page refresh or purge, and it's a wikilink to the Special:ActiveUsers page.
The Special:ActiveUsers page is locked, there is no Talk page, and I have floundered to find the proper suggestion box for "Special Pages". This addition would be a great asset to that article. Thank you. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk}
18:47, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- If you add ?uselang=qqx or &uselang=qqx to a url then it shows names of used interface pages in the MediaWiki namespace. For Special:ActiveUsers it diplays "(activeusers-summary)" and "(activeusers-intro: 30)" at the top, meaning MediaWiki:activeusers-summary, and MediaWiki:activeusers-intro with the parameter $1=30. MediaWiki pages have talk pages but often they haven't been created or aren't active. {{Edit fully-protected}} can be used to get admin attention. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:01, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Test rendering of SVG files
Is it possible to get a rendering of SVG files without actually uploading them? I frequently get a problem with Inkscape that "invisible" objects are generated in the drawing. They are not rendered either in Inkscape itself or in my browser, but they are rendered by the Wikiengine in the thumbnail as black rectangles. It would be good if I could find them before uploading multiple versions of the same image. SpinningSpark 22:33, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
- There is (or was) a tool, possibly on commons, that was provided by Jarry1250 (talk · contribs). I don't recall what it is called, nor if there is a version on Wikipedia. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:49, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Interlanguage links missing for de:Steinkohle
Hello,
I am trying to debug an issue I am seeing with interlanguage links on de:Steinkohle. If I visit in incognito, I correctly see a list of 30 languages to choose from. However, if I am logged in and have Language settings > Display > Display language set to "Deutsch" (the default setting for this "de" article), I see no languages at all. Changing the setting to `English` causes all languages to appear again.
Notes: The list of language should be coming from wikidata:Q732607. I do not see any of the old interlanguage links in the content of the article. One suspicious item is this: If I view wikidata:Q732607 in incognito window, I see a different set of "In more languages" than I see if logged in.
This seems like a bug to me. Can anyone confirm / or explain whats going on here?
Thanks, -- JonathanCross (talk) 13:36, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- It works for me. What is your browser? Do you have "Kompakte Sprachlinks" ("Compact language links") enabled at de:Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures? Do you see the language links when you are not logged in and not in incognito? Which language links at wikidata:Q732607 are different for incognito? Is the issue only at de:Steinkohle or also other German pages? PrimeHunter (talk) 14:21, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Interesting. If I look at it when logged in as NSH002, I see no language links, but I see the full list as NSH001, or if not logged in at all. In both accounts no beta features enabled, and normal Chrome browser (not incognito). One curious feature is that I get the green "Stelle deine Frage" alert at the top as NSH002 but not as NSH001. I made a lot of tweaks to my settings on de:NSH001, but it was a long time ago and can't recall the details. As far as I can remember, the only setting I've changed on de:NSH002 is to enable Navigation popups. --NSH002 (talk) 14:47, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- More info: if I change the language setting to English on de:NSH002, I see the full list. Going incognito also shows the full list. --NSH002 (talk) 15:03, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- + problem only occurs on de:Steinkohle, not on any other de:wp article I've tried on de:NSH002. --NSH002 (talk) 15:13, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
List of top-class stubs
According to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Statistics, there are 4,214 top-importance stubs. I would like a list of these because they would be ideal candidates for the WP:TAFI project. Any chance you could help me out?--Coin945 (talk) 03:08, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Coin945: I've made a list for you on Quarry. — Mr. Stradivarius on tour ♪ talk ♪ 08:22, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I can't thank you enough. :D--Coin945 (talk) 08:25, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Coin945: No worries. I've now also made a wiki-friendly version at User:Mr. Stradivarius/Top-importance stubs. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:30, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- There are some interesting finds in that list. I'm surprised that Choreography is as short as it is, for example. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:45, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- BTW, I already posted something similar. Those are Stub-Class vital articles, that have top or high importance in some of the wikiprojects. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:35, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I can't thank you enough. :D--Coin945 (talk) 08:25, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
@Coin945: I've made a couple of similar searches for you as well: top-importance articles less than 3000 bytes, and articles less than 3000 bytes in top-level categories. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:24, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
Like--Coin945 (talk) 15:50, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
500 Internal Server Error
Recently, there was a 500 Internal Server Error on Wikipedia. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:24, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- See phab:T116593 for the corresponding bug report. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 16:03, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia down
Just a few minutes earlier, Wikipedia was down the with the message "Exception caught inside exception handler". It just came up a minute or two ago. Did anyone else see this? --Biblioworm 15:24, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yep (though I don't remember if that was exactly what the error message said). Even the Main Page was down for this one. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 15:25, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Based upon this and this, it is safe to say you were not alone in seeing the error message. --Allen3 talk 15:27, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- This didn't only affect English Wikipedia. I got the same error message on both Wikipedia and on Commons. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:36, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I tried the Simple English Wikipedia, Metawiki and Wiktionary and they were all down. --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 18:10, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Curious what Wikipedia's electric bill is for their Server farm. Raquel Baranow (talk) 18:21, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I tried the Simple English Wikipedia, Metawiki and Wiktionary and they were all down. --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 18:10, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- This didn't only affect English Wikipedia. I got the same error message on both Wikipedia and on Commons. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:36, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Based upon this and this, it is safe to say you were not alone in seeing the error message. --Allen3 talk 15:27, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Images and responsive design
It's really time Wikipedia image embedding sytnax is overhauled to allow for responsive design. Rather than displaying images to universally fixed pixel widths, there should be scope to allow images to scale gracefully on smaller screen sizes such as tablets and mobile phones. This would be especially useful for wider images. I see some work has gone on to improve the Gallery feature and I've found this to be quite effective in displaying images across mobile devices. However, the Gallery tag seems to be highly contentious and almost always gets deleted by the more fussy editors. It would be much more desirable if the standard image embedding just dealt with this properly. I would suggest that
- images are styled with CSS rather than the old HTML width parameter
- below a given screen size breakpoint (somewhere around the 400px mark), the image width switches to a max-width of 100%.
Is this the best place to post this suggestion, or should I be posting elsewhere? Cnbrb (talk) 17:38, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- This is already tracked in T90914 and also a bit in T69695. Short story, it's freaking simple in theory, but terribly hard in en.wp practice :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:29, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Tech News: 2015-44
18:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Image viewer fails to load image
Hey, all, it looks like the Image Viewer is failing to load images for me. When I click on an image, it begins to load (blurry and low-res), but then switches to a gray screen that says "Sorry, the file cannot be displayed, there seems to be a technical issue. You can retry or report the issue if it exists. Error: could not load image from <url of image>". This has happened on every image I've tried to click on so far, in multiple articles (currently speed of light, and others). I haven't filed a Phabricator bug yet; I did a quick search and couldn't find any that seemed relevant, but figured it'd be better to post here before possibly filing a duplicate. Thanks, 73.133.12.111 (talk) 18:05, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Hm, nevermind, seems to be working now. 73.133.12.111 (talk) 18:07, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Sounds like phab:T115563 and the reasons for the problem are still being investigated. If you are tech-savvy and know your web browser's tools, your help is welcome (see that task at the bottom). --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- AKlapper, it happened again, with error messages like:
- Sounds like phab:T115563 and the reasons for the problem are still being investigated. If you are tech-savvy and know your web browser's tools, your help is welcome (see that task at the bottom). --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Coyoteinacanoe.png. (Reason: CORS request failed). <unknown> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Coyote.jpg. (Reason: CORS request failed). <unknown> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Hermes_Logios_Altemps_33.jpg. (Reason: CORS request failed).
-
-
- Stopped once I CTRL-F5ed to reload. 73.133.12.111 (talk) 19:15, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- Interesting. That sounds like "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" related stuff. Could you add a comment in Phabricator task phab:T115563 please? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- Stopped once I CTRL-F5ed to reload. 73.133.12.111 (talk) 19:15, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
-
Module:External links and wikibase.getEntity( id )
Hi. Is it possible to use mw.wikibase.getEntity(frame.args[3] or "") in Module:External links to get information from any wikidata item?--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 21:21, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Or maybe there is a better way--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 21:38, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- @ԱշոտՏՆՂ: Why do you want to get data from any Wikidata item? It will be easier for us to help you if we know what you're trying to do. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:22, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Dear Mr. Stradivarius: There are two standardized literary forms of Modern Aremnian. But we use the same wiki (hy.wikipedia.org). It is not possible to link two articles to wikidata item, but I want to use this template in both articles. For example like this {{external links|Q=Q937}}--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 23:32, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- @ԱշոտՏՆՂ: Why do you want to get data from any Wikidata item? It will be easier for us to help you if we know what you're trying to do. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:22, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Problem with rendering of tex vline
Referring to User talk:Eric Kvaalen#vline. Usage of the tex element \vline, as in
using MathML, results in
- Failed to parse (Conversion error. Server ("http://mathoid.svc.eqiad.wmnet:10042") reported: "Error:["TeX parse error: Undefined control sequence \\vline"]"): \int_e^{\infty}\frac 1{t(\ln t)^2}dt={\frac{-1}{\ln t}\,\vline\,}_e^\infty
Using PNG it renders fine. Any idea anyone? - DVdm (talk) 12:46, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
- vline is not a mathcommand. It's a table building command and not part of the math rendering tex subset. It works historically in PNG mode (there is a ticket about such markings somewhere...), but it's not correct. You'll want \vert, \rvert, \lvert \left \right \mid or \divides, depending on the semantic meaning that you require...
- For instance using \Bigg\vert:
- —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:50, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks a bunch. User Eric Kvaalen, it looks like the usage of \vert is already covered in Help:Displaying a formula but if you think we can use this example, do go ahead. Cheers - DVdm (talk) 16:50, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Have people always get notified when they receive a response to their post.
It looks like it's not very hard for the people who have the capability of changing notifying algorithms to figure out how to change the algorithm of getting notified when you get pinged to an algorithm that will notify you every time a post in that section with more indentations gets created that's under a post signed by you but above the next post that has as many or fewer indentations. It might be even easier but not as useful to figure out how to create an algorithm that notifies you every time a section whose top post is signed by you gets edited by somebody other than you. Blackbombchu (talk) 16:59, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
- There is a project to do this. It is called WP:Flow. You can see it in action at most talk pages on mw:. Hmm, it looks like I have notifications about posts on 15 different pages over there. Perhaps I'll even find time to read them all this week. ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Find me a new teammate?
Hi everyone,
This is a quick heads-up that my team is hiring someone for the mw:Discovery team. The job description is here, but the ideal candidate is not only an experienced editor, but also someone who speaks at least one language other than English and who is nicer than I am. ;-) If you are interested, then please apply soon; if you know someone who would be good, then please pass the information along. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:11, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Characters replaced with #
In the past few days, I've noticed a couple of cases in which an edit replaced various characters in an article (parentheses, brackets, periods, etc.) with # characters. I seem to recall that the Visual Editor was doing something like this at one time, but these don't seem to be VE edits—at least they're not tagged as such. (I don't know whether it's significant that both editors were merely trying to disambiguate a wikilink.) Anyone have a clue to what's going on here? Deor (talk) 18:05, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
- Looks to me like a browser extension is interfering with something. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:23, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
- Agree with TheDJ, it was happening for some people before VE went live. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:36, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
- It looks like both examples used Dab solver although the first didn't say so in the edit summary. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:33, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- It is the cross-site scripting XSS in Internet Explorer. The browser will say "Internet Explorer has modified this page to help prevent cross-site scripting." at the bottom of the screen in IE9, 10, and 11 and the top in IE8 and earlier. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:35, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- It looks like both examples used Dab solver although the first didn't say so in the edit summary. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:33, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- Agree with TheDJ, it was happening for some people before VE went live. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:36, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
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-
-
- I can confirm both edits were done by IE11 users.
- Bug T34013 (2011) for WMF to fix it (they said they wont accept patches).
- XSS Filter Edit filter (2012) about adding another warning or preventing saving.
- OAuth (2015) is alpha quality software that WMF has allocated no budget, confusing to users with weird permissions, no support for IP editors, and my requests keep expiring. Only good for identification.
- Good Luck getting anywhere with WMF leadership. Wikiconference 2015 was an eye opening experience for me where I kept saying "I did this X years ago" and hearing organizations I was rejected by were now in partnerships with the WMF. — Dispenser 02:09, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- I'd also add that many users will not understand why their edits were reverted, because it only occurs after saving the page, and show preview will show everything correctly. Gparyani (talk) 17:38, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- Well, in the two cases I cited, I reverted the messed-up edits and then performed the edits that the editors were trying to make. (One of them wrote a thank-you note on the article's talk page.) Yes, I can see that someone might be surprised, but one would think that even a cursory glance at the article after the edit was saved would clue an editor in that something had gone wrong. Deor (talk) 20:36, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- I'd also add that many users will not understand why their edits were reverted, because it only occurs after saving the page, and show preview will show everything correctly. Gparyani (talk) 17:38, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- I can confirm both edits were done by IE11 users.
-
-
wikitable IPA no longer working?
Got logged out this morning, and noticed that setting a table to class "wikitable IPA" no longer forces the contents to display in a font that supports the IPA. Is it broken, or has something changed? Thanks — kwami (talk) 20:34, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- Nothing has changed. But the IPA class is added through javascript in Common.js.
-- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}}
10:24, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata descriptions
Hello, apologies for the delayed notice, but this is headsup that, on the mobile version, Wikidata search results will be showing underneath the article name while searching. This has already been active on beta for a while, how it works is that for a person on their mobile device, when they start typing in the search box, the description will show underneath each item like the example in the image.
. Thanks--Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 11:29, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
Contributions from IP ranges
When placing a range block it would be handy to be able to see contributions from a range of IP addresses. For example it would be great if Special:Contributions/151.20.0.0/17 could show all contributions from IP addresses in that range. Is there a technical reason why this is not possible? Or some privacy issue perhaps? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:06, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
- Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets has: Allow /16, /24 and /27 – /32 CIDR ranges on Special:Contributions forms (uses API), as well as wildcard prefix searches, e.g., "Splark*". (Please report any issues here.) PrimeHunter (talk) 12:24, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) I have wondered about that too. Searching 151.20.0.0/16 and 151.20.0.0/24 work perfectly, but 151.20.0.0/17 fails. The ones that work correspond to 151.20.*.* and 151.20.0.*, so it looks like the internals are working with the asterixes, as /17 can't be text wildcarded. Just a guess. - DVdm (talk) 12:34, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
Banner colliding with name
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 15:29, 29 October 2015 (UTC).
-
- For all our readers? I never get it, when I point out a problem with the interface, I get solutions that hide the symptom for me. I feel like an ageing climate scientist trying to warn of an impending ice age, and getting a rug tucked around my knees, and a cup of hot coco.
- Thanks for the coco! But that's not really the point.
- All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:23, 29 October 2015 (UTC).
- Looks like a meta:CentralNotice. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:59, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
- I'll cut and paste this there. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:45, 29 October 2015 (UTC).
- I'll cut and paste this there. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:45, 29 October 2015 (UTC).
SUL issue
I am regularly finding that I am not signed in to sister projects. Is this happening to other people? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 15:32, 29 October 2015 (UTC).
- Have you switched off third-party cookies? --Stefan2 (talk) 15:50, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
- All second level domains have user, token and session cookies which have the same values as the other domains.
- All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:19, 29 October 2015 (UTC).
Watchlist and your opinion
Hello technical people. Please watchlist Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Optional RfA candidate poll and drop by to give your views. Thank you kindly. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 19:51, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
Automatically detecting edit types -- New project. Help wanted.
Hey folks. The Revscoring Team and I have been working on vandalism detection and article quality prediction for Wikipedia/Wikidata. We have some high quality classifiers online (see m:ORES) and their use is growing (see m:R:Revscoring#Tools that use ORES). The next classifier that we think will prove valuable for wikiwork is one that, given a revision ID, can tell you what type of change was made in that edit. Just to give you a sense for what such an edit type classifier could do, I've mocked up a type-augmented article history page. See the thumbnail on the right.
So, in order to do this well, I need your help. Before we can detect edit types, we need to figure out what types are important and build a taxonomy. We've been working through past research (e.g. Daxenberger & Gurevych (2012)), documentation around standardized edit summaries (e.g. Wikipedia:Edit summary legend), and tools that produce edit summaries (e.g. MediaWiki:Gadget-defaultsummaries.js). We've started to flesh out a Taxonomy that includes all potential edit types. We need your help to make sure we didn't miss anything important.
Eventually, we'll also need help labeling a random sample of edits by the type of change that was made. We're planning to use Wikipedia:Labels to make that work easy. If you'd be interested in helping us with that, please add your name to the list of volunteers on the campaign description page: Wikipedia:Labels/Edit types --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 21:15, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
Blank Afd page
Why is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/512k day appearing blank? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:33, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's appearing fine for me. Whatever it was, it must have been temporary. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 05:06, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
Reducing the load of WP:TAFI unofficial-manager Northamerica1000
Hello VP Technical Wikipedians! TAFI is a Wikiproject that aims to encourage collaborative improvement of shoddy articles on important topics. Our fantastic colleague @Northamerica1000: has been doing various manual tasks for us for a very long time in order to keep the project afloat. North wants to decrease her/his load, and I want to help in any way I can. I come here to ask for your brains and creativity in coming up with ways to help automate the tasks through bots etc. If you can think of any ways to help us, or require more information on the innerworkings of how things currently work at TAFI, please comment below. :D--Coin945 (talk) 09:58, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
Northamerica1000 TAFI's current manual tasks:
- Adding templates to approved/unapproved nominations
- Updating the articles for improvement page, including the addition of new approved entries and removing entries that are scheduled
- Scheduling, including creating/populating the necessary subpages, writing captions, adding images
- Notify Wikiprojects when articles within their scope are a weekly selection – {{TAFI project notice}}
- Update article talk pages when collaborations have finished – {{Former TAFI}}. This has not been performed lately.
- Removing {{TAFI}} from atop articles when collaborations have concluded. The template is added by Theo's Little Bot, but it appears that it must be manually removed.
- Sending weekly notifications to users on the notifications list. This is typically done using mass messaging.
- Updating project accomplishments
- Periodic updates to the automation and templates page as needed
- Periodically checking the members page to make sure things are properly formatted
- Fixing template errors that occur from time-to-time.
- Updating project pages periodically when project processes change, such as instructions and templates
- Promoting the project by sending invitations – {{Today's article for improvement invitation}}
Discussion
Note that the tasks above are also located at the TAFI project's Project management page. North America1000 10:48, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- I'd recommend cross-posting at WP:BOTREQ. Jenks24 (talk) 12:55, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Also see the project's Automation & templates page for an overview of present and former bot tasks. North America1000 13:04, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
red box with deletion-log no longer visible (to some wikipedians) , unless deletion was "within the last 24 hours"
Apologies if this has been brought up before; searching for red box deletion log 2015 gives a lot of unrelated hits. :-)
The usual this-page-was-deleted redbox seems to have been significantly modified. At least for people who are viewing pages whilst logged out. Ping User:JAaron95, with whom I believe I discussed this briefly on #wikipedia-en-help connect livechat a few weeks ago, with respect to ruWiki policies at the time.
example#1 , Pauscal programming language
- Mar'15, article exists == https://web.archive.org/web/20150319185744/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauscal
- May'15, article PROD'd == https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=Pauscal
- Oct'15, no PROD mentioned == https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauscal
- Oct'15, unless you know where to click == https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=Pauscal
- Oct'15, essay which is linked unto == https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_was_the_page_I_created_deleted%3F
example#2 , Genesis Mining cloud computing company
The usual redbox is visible:
- Sorry, this page was recently deleted (within the last 24 hours). The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.
- 17:50, 29 October 2015 User:DGG, deleted page Genesis Mining (Recreation of article by bitcoin sock.)
- 19:03, 1 September 2015 DGG, deleted page Genesis Mining (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion: A7 - startup company without credible claim of notability, created by Orangemoody sock, non-reliable sources for central claims, already speedy-deleted once)
- 23:03, 27 April 2015 RHaworth, deleted page Genesis Mining (A7: Article about an eligible subject, which does not credibly indicate the importance or significance of the subject)
However, I can find no enWiki discussion[34] on the change in behavior for eliminating the display of the redbox after that 24-hour window has passed. Can someone point me to where this happened? metaWiki? phabricator? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? p.s. I believe, from the livechat conversation, that logged-in editors can still see the example#1 redbox deletion log info at Pauscal immediately. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:28, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
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- I checked it as an unlogged-in editor on another computer. It was visible to me. DGG ( talk ) 15:36, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks DGG... and just to be sure, by "it" you mean you clicked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauscal , and you (without clicking anything else) saw a red box containing the words "WP:PROD: Nominated for seven days with no objection"? Because I don't see the redbox anymore. I used to, on other articles.
- I checked it as an unlogged-in editor on another computer. It was visible to me. DGG ( talk ) 15:36, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
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- e#1. what I see at Pauscal:
- <div id="mw-content-text" lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
- <div class="noarticletext mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en">
- <table id="noarticletext" class="plainlinks fmbox fmbox-system" role="presentation"><tr>...
- e#1. what I see at Pauscal:
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-
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- e#1_prime. what I would expect to see at Pauscal :
- <div id="mw-content-text" lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
- <div class="mw-warning-with-logexcerpt mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en">
- <p>Page was deleted... deletion log message...
- e#1_prime. what I would expect to see at Pauscal :
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-
-
- e#2. what I see at Genesis Mining, similar to what I would expect but with the new 'last 24 hours' sentence which I presume is recently added to mediawiki:
- <div id="mw-content-text" lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
- <div class="mw-warning-with-logexcerpt mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en">
- <p>Sorry, this page was recently deleted (within the last 24 hours).
- e#2. what I see at Genesis Mining, similar to what I would expect but with the new 'last 24 hours' sentence which I presume is recently added to mediawiki:
-
-
-
- Maybe this is skin-related, or even browser-specific somehow? Firefox 38.2 and whatever the default skin, is what I'm using at present. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:01, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
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- So, the page Pauscal should look different when not logged in. It does for me. Anyway, [35] - it's summarised as "Reduced the DOS potential of 404 page floods" -- zzuuzz (talk) 16:03, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Ah, thanks zzuuzz. For those who want the shorthand summary, the change was made because
- there are a lot of search-enginess and web-crawlers and such
- most of them are IP-only (they don't login when crawling wikipedia pages)
- many of the off-wiki crawlers misbehave, trying to crawl deleted pages or more simply, pages-which-never-existed
- displaying the deletion-log (and maybe even checking whether to display) is a relatively expensive database hit , in terms of number of pushups the server-kitties must do , compared to simply displaying a link to the deletion-log
- theoretically ... or maybe even actually ... some adversary might try to exploit that weakness of the server-kitties , by making a crawler that endlessly reloaded millions of deleted pages
- Therefore, as of mediawiki 1.26.something, only pages that were deleted within the past 24 hours show the deletion-log, and all other non-existent pages (whether deleted or just never created) only show a hyperlink to the deletion-log (which might or might not be empty). This is easier on the server-kitties, because the list of recently-deleted-articles is quite small at any given time, and the boilerplate no-such-page-found text is cleanly cacheable for the most part. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:24, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Ah, thanks zzuuzz. For those who want the shorthand summary, the change was made because
- So, the page Pauscal should look different when not logged in. It does for me. Anyway, [35] - it's summarised as "Reduced the DOS potential of 404 page floods" -- zzuuzz (talk) 16:03, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
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- That's it: the server kitties. They all died long ago, thanks to Brion VIBBER, because people overused {{Infobox}}, {{Asbox}}, etc. :-) Nyttend (talk) 16:29, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
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The deletion and move log still appear when creating a new talk or draft page, and also when viewing the (empty) page history. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 19:12, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
Pageview stats case insensitive
I noticed today that the stats tool ([stats.grok.se]) is not differentiating between different capitalization cases for page view stats. I have not noticed before whether or not the stats are case-sensitive, but Wikipedia is, so the case-insensitivity is a significant flaw. If this can be fixed, it should be. For example, the stats for apple ([36]) are identical to the stats for APPLE (([37]). This is unhelpful because APPLE is currently up at RfD and the pageview tool is returning stats for an entirely different page, if not both pages combined. Can this be repaired? Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 18:38, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Not very likely, because the service is not being maintained and just kept in keep alive mode by it's developer. The analytics team at WMF is currently testing the new pageview API. That's where future development likely will occur. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:59, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- The same question was asked about 3 weeks ago: here. In response to an unrelated question about the tool about a week ago, User:PrimeHunter said, "The page view stats at http://stats.grok.se/ is an external tool made by a single volunteer editor User:Henrik who rarely replies to questions or makes edits to Wikipedia. I don't think anyone else knows when he is working on the tool. Note that the tool is not a feature in the MediaWiki software and is not run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The editors of the English Wikipedia have just agreed to add some links to it, notably in MediaWiki:Histlegend which is displayed at top of page histories. The tool uses publicly available data and others could make an alternative tool but I don't know any that work." Akld guy (talk) 19:26, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's been case-insensitive for as long as I can remember. Nothing's wrong, and nothing's different. The number of hits for apple is smaller than what you're seeing, because it does indeed mix the hits for apple and APPLE. For example, the results for http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Christopher_Lloyd should be slightly higher than the 509,328 hits recorded at WP:5000, since it will include results for christopher lloyd as well as results for Christopher Lloyd. Of course, if we could add such a functionality, it would be nice; I'm not trying to dismiss your idea. Nyttend (talk) 19:58, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Alright, well we'll have to keep those things in mind when we talk about hits in deletion discussions. Thanks all. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 16:24, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's been case-insensitive for as long as I can remember. Nothing's wrong, and nothing's different. The number of hits for apple is smaller than what you're seeing, because it does indeed mix the hits for apple and APPLE. For example, the results for http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Christopher_Lloyd should be slightly higher than the 509,328 hits recorded at WP:5000, since it will include results for christopher lloyd as well as results for Christopher Lloyd. Of course, if we could add such a functionality, it would be nice; I'm not trying to dismiss your idea. Nyttend (talk) 19:58, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
Any tool for counting transclusions of many templates?
I know about the transclusion count tool, but it only works one template at a time. When trying to judge if any upmerged stubs are over the 60-article line for being split out into having their own categories, it's a pretty tedious task to have to go through every single one you want to check in turn -- especially when there are, in some cases, literal hundreds at a time. Is there any way to check for a whole bunch at once? Or am I out of luck? Buttons to Push Buttons (talk | contribs) 17:06, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Buttons to Push Buttons: do you need it regularly or in quite rare cases? Could probably help. You could give that bunch of templates in interest for first try. Feel free to put them in my talk page, so this page doesn't get spammed :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:12, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
HOVER LINK: HIDDEN ERROR: Usage of "_VALUE_" is not recognized
When hovering over the link to Michael Laucke, the image in the infobox is picked up fine, but the introductory page text one is accustomed to view, does not render, and reads "HIDDEN ERROR: Usage of "_VALUE_" is not recognized". The link works however. When one gets to the Michael Laucke article, the same problem occurs when hovering over Elton John. Many thanks in advance for your kind help; it is always much appreciated. --Natalie.Desautels (talk) 03:27, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- It appears to be outputted by the infobox in an invisible (
style="display:none;"
) span element, using Module:Check for unknown parameters. I'm looking into it further, but I lack proficiency in Lua, so someone else may be able to help better. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 03:46, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
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- @Checkingfax: Thanks very kindly Nihiltres. Hovering over links to the article Michael Laucke is now working properly. The hover link to Elton John has the same problem; I understand it has to be fixed elsewhere. Thanks you once again; very much appreciated. I look forward to following this issue and it's broadly implemented resolution. --Natalie.Desautels (talk) 06:55, 1 November 2015 (UTC)'
- @Natalie.Desautels and Nihiltres: Is this error seen when using Popups, or is it some other setup? I can't reproduce it myself, so it's hard to know what to fix. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:54, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- When "Navigation popups" is enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets, I see "Word1 word2 word3." when hovering over User:PrimeHunter/display none. The source says
Word1 <span style="display:none;">word2</span> word3.
, so on the page it renders as "Word1 word3." without "word2" displayed – at least for me in a normally working browser. The issue for Michael Laucke was fixed by Nihiltres' stopgap edit to a template used there. A broad fix would be for Popups to recognizestyle="display:none;"
and omit display. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:41, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- When "Navigation popups" is enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets, I see "Word1 word2 word3." when hovering over User:PrimeHunter/display none. The source says
- @Natalie.Desautels and Nihiltres: Is this error seen when using Popups, or is it some other setup? I can't reproduce it myself, so it's hard to know what to fix. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:54, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- @Checkingfax: Thanks very kindly Nihiltres. Hovering over links to the article Michael Laucke is now working properly. The hover link to Elton John has the same problem; I understand it has to be fixed elsewhere. Thanks you once again; very much appreciated. I look forward to following this issue and it's broadly implemented resolution. --Natalie.Desautels (talk) 06:55, 1 November 2015 (UTC)'
-
I noticed the issue using Hovercards. While my stopgap edit fixed the immediate issue, there's still the underlying problem that Module:Check for unknown parameters is outputting a generic error message (rather than one specific to the particular unknown parameter[s]), and given that it might be producing such improper error messages elsewhere; it seems advisable to take defensive measures like forcing non-category error messages from the module to be wrapped in something with class="error"
. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 20:06, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- @Checkingfax: Thank you again, Nihiltres, for fixing the issue on the Michael Laucke page. I have seen this error on a few pages, such as Louis Armstrong, although the "hidden error" preventing good rendering on this page is different, and it seems that Elton John's infobox output is now fixed. best wishes, --Natalie.Desautels (talk) 07:47, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- I've fixed Module:Check for unknown parameters. The bug was a regression that occurred after a fix for templates that use the blank parameter (
| = foo
). — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:35, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- I've fixed Module:Check for unknown parameters. The bug was a regression that occurred after a fix for templates that use the blank parameter (
GALLERY broken?
Recently, the GaLLERY tag display seems broken to me, instead of having it roll horizontally across the page like a FLATLIST, it is appearing as a bulletted vertical list. This affects both Wikipedia, and on Wikipedia category pages that contain images, and Wikimedia Commons
Did someone modify whatever CSS this uses (and break it)?
-- 70.51.44.60 (talk) 05:27, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- link please, which browser, which os, which versions of those, and I'm assuming logged out ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:37, 1 November 2015 (UTC)So
- I know gallery tags doesn't have anything to do with Special:Prefixindex and Special:Allpages, but maybe related to phab:T32965? And I have also encountered with this problem, but everything is fine after some 0.5 sec. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:23, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- Ah, this is because of phab:T117328. The IP probably had Javascript disabled.. A fix is on its way. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:45, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, that's exactly it. Why the change? (It's also why the searchbox is borked, since the searchbox hasn't worked in years, after then change was implemented requiring JavaScript, or else the searchpage would result) -- 70.51.44.60 (talk) 08:54, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- Ah, this is because of phab:T117328. The IP probably had Javascript disabled.. A fix is on its way. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:45, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- I know gallery tags doesn't have anything to do with Special:Prefixindex and Special:Allpages, but maybe related to phab:T32965? And I have also encountered with this problem, but everything is fine after some 0.5 sec. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:23, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
5,000,000 articles logo needs to be put in place
There was a logo election, and a logo was selected to temporarily replace the wikiglobe on the sidebar once the article count exceeded 5,000,000. Now that the 5 million mark has been reached, a tech-savy admin is needed to put the logo in place. See Wikipedia:Requests for comment/5 millionth article logo.
Thank you. The Transhumanist 12:53, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
This can't be done locally by enwiki admins (see the instructions on mediawiki.org). The WMF tech staff are on the ball,though, and the logo is already up. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:45, 1 November 2015 (UTC)- Actually it was done locally, with this edit to Common.css. This is an easier way to do it for a short-term change. the wub "?!" 13:55, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- I stand corrected. That's a lot of my original post that has to be struck! — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:02, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- http://www.wikipedia.org/ still shows that we have 4,999,000+ articles. When will this be updated? Gparyani (talk) 18:39, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- A meta admin can update it at meta:Www.wikipedia.org template. I don't know whewther changes go live right away. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:01, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- http://www.wikipedia.org/ still shows that we have 4,999,000+ articles. When will this be updated? Gparyani (talk) 18:39, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- I stand corrected. That's a lot of my original post that has to be struck! — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:02, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- Actually it was done locally, with this edit to Common.css. This is an easier way to do it for a short-term change. the wub "?!" 13:55, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
-
-
-
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- @Gparyani: The portal is updated semi-manually based on m:List of Wikipedias/Table, which is updated automatically by a bot each midnight UTC. The 5 millionth article missed the cutoff by a bit, but I made an exception just this once, since the milestone is bound to get some attention. – Minh Nguyễn 💬 19:54, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) I noticed that the page still showed 4,999,000+ articles even after the recent edit. I purged it just now and it says 5,000,000+, but the front page still has the old value cached. Gparyani (talk) 19:56, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
-
-
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Counting growth in article types: Did we just have a 37% spike in Women architects?
The Wikipedia:Meetup/Women in Red/3 / Guggenheim / WikiD edit-a-thon campaign, by my rough hand-count, appear to have increased membership in Category:Women architects, including national subcategories, by 37%! (451=pre-event; 619= post-event; % Change = 37%) Is anyone able to technically confirm or correct this with tools / bots / coding magic?--Pharos (talk) 19:18, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- Well, [THIS LINK] shows new names which have been added to List of women architects. There are quite a few new ones. —Anne Delong (talk) 20:16, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- @Pharos: If you know the right URL to input, you can view categories sorted by the date that articles were added to them. Here's the result for Category:Women architects. There were 34 articles added to it on 22 October. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:27, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
Log out
If you are logged in on two computers and you log out on one of the computers, you are also logged out on the other computer. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 22:55, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- Yes. Logging out sends a message to the Wikimedia servers that causes all previously-issued cookies for your login to be invalidated. That has been the case for as long as I can remember. I suspect that it's intentional: if you log in on a public computer, but forget to log out, you merely need to log in anywhere and immediately log out again. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:55, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
- @GeoffreyT2000: To amplify that, see comment by csteipp posted Jul 11 2013, 9:18 PM. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:56, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
Help someone fix a small bug in your code project: It's Google Code-In time!
Help someone fix a small bug in your code project: It's Google Code-In time!
- Are you a developer and have small, self-contained, "easy" bugs in your Wikimedia code that you would love to get fixed?
- Would you enjoy helping someone port your template to Lua?
- Does your gadget use some deprecated API calls?
- Does the documentation of your code need some improvements?
- Do you enjoy mentoring to a new contributor fixing small tasks?
Google Code-In (GCI) will take place again in December and January: a contest for 13-17 year old students to provide small contributions to free software projects. Wikimedia will apply again to take part and would like to offer a wide range of tasks. Just one example: Multimedia saw some impressive achievements in last year's contest!
Tasks should take an experienced contributed about two-three hours ("beginner tasks" also welcome which are smaller) and can be of the categories Code, Documentation/Training, Outreach/Research, Quality Assurance, and User Interface/Design. For more information, check the wiki page and if something is unclear, please ask on the talk page!
Thank you, --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 23:59, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
WP shortcuts appear to be broken
I noticed just now that WP:YESPOV does not take me to the correct sub-chapter of WP:NPOV. And when I checked the main "see also" for that same chapter, WP:ASSERT, it didn't take me to the right place either. -- Kendrick7talk 09:18, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- Sounds like Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 140#Links to sections on other pages not going to beginning of section and threads linked back from that. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:00, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- When I clicked on that link, it didn't go to the beginning of the section, but scrolled nearly halfway further down the page. I've noticed this problem on other pages too but it's intermittent, and doesn't seem to be connected to a particular browser or OS. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 14:52, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- Kendrick7, are you using Safari?
- Ivanvector, are there collapsed/hatted sections on that page? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:17, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- Nope, using Chrome on Windows 10. -- Kendrick7talk 19:24, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- Using Firefox on Windows 7 and Chrome on Windows 10 here. No, there do not seem to be collapsed sections on the page. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:30, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- There's a known bug in (at least some versions of) Safari that causes redirects to not point always to the correct place. (The bug's in Safari, not in MediaWiki.) Chrome and Safari are both WebKit browsers, but I don't know if they both have the same bug. I'm inclined to guess that the problem is something else. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- When I clicked on that link, it didn't go to the beginning of the section, but scrolled nearly halfway further down the page. I've noticed this problem on other pages too but it's intermittent, and doesn't seem to be connected to a particular browser or OS. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 14:52, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
Is Wikipedia development slowing down?
As can be seen in the chart below, between the time WP reached 1 million and 2 million it was about a year and a half. Between 2 and 3 million it took almost 2 years, between 3 and 4 million almost 3 years went by, and to reach 5 million over 3 more years.
Aritlce count milestones | Date | Data size |
---|---|---|
1 million | 1 March 2006 | ? |
2 million | 9 September 2007 | ? |
3 million | 17 August 2009 | ? |
4 million | 13 July 2012 | ? |
5 million | 1 Nov 2015 | ? |
So, article creation is slowing down.
But what about development as a whole? By how much has WP been growing in words or bytes?
Can someone track down the size figures for those dates, to finish up the chart?
I look forward to your answers and comments. The Transhumanist 12:26, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia#Size of the English Wikipedia database. The chart you're looking for (total amount of article text) already exists—the trend has been virtually constant for a decade. ‑ iridescent 12:41, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- I believe that chart is based on the size of the database rather than readable article content. This means that it is affected by change in formatting trends (e.g., using bulkier citation templates instead of manual formatting, or removing interwiki links in favor of hosting that information at Wikidata). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
-
-
- Thank you. The Transhumanist 20:19, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
-
Template FlagATHCH
See 2010 European Athletics Championships – Women's 800 metres - in the 'Results' section the country of the participants is repeated: Mariya Savinova - Russia (Russia). Is there something wrong with the FlagATHCH template? Ssu (talk) 13:17, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- The {{FlagATHCH}} documentation says the first parameter should be a three-letter code, not a country name, so I have edited the article. -- John of Reading (talk) 13:32, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
Wrongly initialised chevrons in mobile version of articles
Another user reported this on the Help Desk, and I confirmed it using Chrome on a Google Nexus (android). When a page first loads, all the chevrons point downwards but the content is collapsed. When a section is then opened, the chevron still points downward. Only when the section is then collapsed again does the chevron point upwards. Maproom (talk) 14:01, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- I see the same, and I have created a ticket in Phabricator for this problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:39, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
Redirects
Some redirects, such as Talk:Robert J Hirsch -> Talk:Robert J. Hirsch and Talk:List of If Loving You Is Wrong (TV series) episodes -> Talk:List of If Loving You Is Wrong episodes are not listed in Special:WhatLinksHere for the target page. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 14:56, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- The redirects are from moves today. I guess the WhatLinksHere entries are delayed in the job queue per Anomie's post in #Article categories not always saving completely. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:15, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- I found that Talk:Robert J Hirsch wasn't listed at Special:WhatLinksHere/Talk:Robert J. Hirsch, so I did a WP:NULLEDIT on Talk:Robert J Hirsch and now it's listed. Null edits don't fix the category problem. But it's definitely a problem if WhatLinksHere is not accurate unless those in the know take appropriate action - an article might get marked as an
{{orphan}}
but more seriously, an image or template might be considered orphaned and so eligible for WP:CSD. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:37, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- I found that Talk:Robert J Hirsch wasn't listed at Special:WhatLinksHere/Talk:Robert J. Hirsch, so I did a WP:NULLEDIT on Talk:Robert J Hirsch and now it's listed. Null edits don't fix the category problem. But it's definitely a problem if WhatLinksHere is not accurate unless those in the know take appropriate action - an article might get marked as an
Tech News: 2015-45
16:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
Transclusion backlinks disappear when a page is blanked
When an article is blanked by vandals, the transclusion backlinks disappear from the backlinks list. The article is immediately restored by a bot, but the transclusion backlinks are still missing in 'What Links Here' (or the API). A current example is David Livingstone which was recently blanked -- there are no transclusion backlinks in the WLH. There should be because the article has templates (for example {{Internet Archive author}}). Eventually the transclusions will re-appear but it can take up to 7 days. Is this expected behavior? -- GreenC 21:20, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
-
- After reading this page it seems the problem is delay in the queue and the solution is a WP:NULLEDIT. I've made a feature request with ClueBot to add a NE after a page blank->restore. -- GreenC 21:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
IPv6 incompatibility: information thingamabob on user talk pages for anonymous users
Hi everyone! When creating a user talk page for an IP address, there's always a box telling us that it's the discussion page for an IP user, yadda yadda, and a bunch of links to WHOIS, WMFLabs, and the RIRs. Great. No problem, very useful. You can see it here, I don't know where exactly it comes from, probably somewhere in the MediaWiki namespace. However, it doesn't show this box when creating a user talk page for an IPv6 address, such as here. Any chance this can be added? Thanks! Rchard2scout (talk) 21:52, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- The MediaWiki page is MediaWiki:Anontalkpagetext. Relentlessly (talk) 22:02, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- It starts with MediaWiki:Newarticletext which is diplayed by the software on page creations. It contains this:
<!--The below two ifeq-cases detects if it is an IP-user page and then shows the MediaWiki:Anontalkpagetext. -->{{#ifeq: {{#expr:{{PAGENAME}}}} | {{PAGENAME}} | | {{#ifeq: {{#expr: {{PAGENAME}}}} | {{#expr: {{PAGENAME}}+deliberatesyntaxerror }} | | {{MediaWiki:Anontalkpagetext|caller=MediaWiki:Newarticletext}} }} }}
-
- It was designed for IPv4 and uses that
{{#expr:{{PAGENAME}}}}
doesn't produces an error message for IPv4 addresses which only contain digits and periods. See Template talk:IP-user other. There are also certain unusual usernames which give false positives by not producing an error. However, IPv6 addresses do produce an error message and are therefore falsely identified as usernames. Is there a reliable way to detect IP addresses without a complicated bunch of nested string functions? Maybe a module function written for the purpose? It could also be used in {{IP-user other}} and {{IP-talk}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:54, 2 November 2015 (UTC) - I'm not a Lua coder but I have made {{IPv6 other}} to test for IPv6 addresses by using Module:String#match with a long Lua pattern. If others can do something better then go ahead. I haven't used the template anywhere yet. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:36, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- If somebody wants just to copy and adapt the code to new module, then here is one (last comment). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:48, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- Oh, Swedish Wikipedia has it already :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:50, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- It was designed for IPv4 and uses that
Women's college basketball team roster formats with "Lady" in team name
Some NCAA basketball teams have gendered nicknames, e.g. the University of Massachusetts Minutewomen, but one of the templates commonly used for NCAA team articles requires that "men's" or "women's" be added, even though it's unnecessary because we can assume that the Lady Volunteers are a women's team. Someone tried to fix this situation previously, but the effort was dropped after one of the editors was blocked, and it's not yet done. Could someone try to help? See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_128#Template_question for the first effort.
I discovered this issue at User talk:Sphilbrick while leaving a note on an unrelated matter. I quote the relevant chunks of that talk page:
Hey. Has there ever been any template for those few women's teams that use the "Lady" in their names to override the "women's" bit? I noticed those created in the past say "Lady <team> women's basketball team", which wrong, long and a mouthful. Seems like I remember the same problem with infobox formats. — Wyliepedia 03:37, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- @CAWylie: Yes, and no. Sorry for the useless answer, but my monitor just dies so I have to get a replacement. I'll provide a more useful, though still complicated answer in a couple hours.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:09, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- @CAWylie:There is sort of the ability to suppress "women" if the team name includes "Lady", but it's a bit of a kludge and it doesn't always work.
- If you look at the source of {{Infobox NCAA team season/name}} you will see that there is a list of teams for which a conversion takes place. It is a terrible way to accomplish this, and worse, even though it seems to work in the example for UMass, if you check out 2014–15_UMass_Minutewomen_basketball_team, you'll see that it doesn't correctly work there.
- It does work in some cases, for example 2013–14_Central_Arkansas_Sugar_Bears_basketball_team.
- If you check out Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_128#Template_question You'll see I started trying to solving the problem. Unfortunately, the editor with the technical experts expertise got himself blocked.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:45, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, the issue is that the infobox is supposed to begin with a link to the program's article, e.g. 2014–15 Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team begins with a link to Connecticut Huskies women's basketball, but with at least some of these gendered team names, we get silly links like UMass Minutewomen women's basketball instead of the correct UMass Minutewomen basketball. Because we get different results between 2014–15 Central Arkansas Sugar Bears basketball team and 2014–15 UMass Minutewomen basketball team, even though the coding is essentially identical, something's wrong that ought to be fixed. Nyttend (talk) 23:27, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
Page curation
Redirects that were edited into articles remain in the page curation queue only for a short amount of time. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:16, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Patrol log
Why is the patrol log shown by default for logged out users, but hidden by default for logged in users? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:00, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
- More precisely, it's hidden by default for autoconfirmed users who have a "Show patrol log" option at Special:Log. IP's and new users don't have an option at all. They always see the patrol log. I'm not sure of the reason but it's probably connected to autoconfirmed users having the
patrol
user right to mark others' edits as patrolled. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:34, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Issue when redirects on Wikipedia and redirect on Commons have the same title
While working on some issues with file name having the same names as files on Wikimedia Commons, I seem to have ran across a rather annoying technical bug; it seems that if there is a file namespace redirect on both Wikipedia (at least here on the English one) and Wikimedia Commons, when looking up the title on Wikipedia if the redirect on Wikipedia is subdued (by a XFD or speedy deletion notification of some sort), the redirect page on Wikipedia will be completely bypassed, redirecting the viewer to the Wikipedia local page for the Commons file with no way to view any part of the Wikipedia redirect. Here's the example I ran across: File:Cesare Mori.jpg; on Wikipedia, it is a redirect to File:Cesare Mori3.jpg that currently has a CSD tag placed on it, but on Commons, it (Commons:File:Cesare Mori.jpg) is an active redirect to Commons:File:Cesare Mori2.jpg. When looking up File:Cesare Mori.jpg on Wikipedia, the redirect in Commons is called instead of allowing the viewer to see the redirect page on Wikipedia, bringing the reader to Commons:File:Cesare Mori2.jpg. If effect, I attempted to go to view the redirect page for the Commons redirect directly (Commons:File:Cesare Mori.jpg) to see if there was a way to go to the page on the English Wikipedia from there, but to no avail. I think the issue may be that if there is a soft redirect on Wikipedia when there is an active redirect on Commons with the same name, this issue occurs. Steel1943 (talk) 04:16, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
- The url stays the same at File:Cesare Mori.jpg and you are not really redirected but just see content and tabs corresponding to the redirect target at Commons. The English Wikipedia page can be accessed by manually adding
?redirect=no
to the url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cesare_Mori.jpg?redirect=no. I haven't tested it but I would guess the same happens for any file page which exists at the English Wikipedia without a local file or file redirect. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:35, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Category membership issues
Categories not placing items in the File namespace correctly.
Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as hoaxes
This category has been stuck a 2 for days, even though there are no pages tagged as a hox. What's wrong?--Bbb23 (talk) 04:45, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Bbb23: That is odd. On the main category page (Category:Speedy deletion) it lists the current pages under hoaxes as 1P, 2F. The 1 page is accounted for. I am assuming the 2F stands for 2 files so it must be something in the File namespace that is triggering it. I just don't know why it is not displaying those files in the category listings. The same thing is happening with Category:Candidates for speedy deletion for unspecified reason. It is showing 1F on the main category page but no listings. --Stabila711 (talk) 05:38, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- This seems like a much larger issue and is probably worth a bug report. I would file one myself but I don't know how to do that. The File namespace is not being allocated to categories correctly. This can be seen multiple times on the speedy deletion page. Even a category marked for deletion as empty (Category:Wooldridge Monuments images) says it contains 10 files and even warns that it doesn't appear empty even though it is. I am going to copy and paste this thread over to VPT and request a bug report be filed. --Stabila711 (talk) 06:02, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
This thread was copied from the Help Desk. Would someone with more technical knowledge take a look at this and post a bug report if necessary? Thank you. --Stabila711 (talk) 06:02, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- Thanks, Stabila711.--Bbb23 (talk) 11:26, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- Some cashing issue. WP:NULLEDIT also didn't help. Wasn't there some API call to force update? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 06:53, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- User:Edgars2007: You might be thinking of
titles=name of page with namespace&action=purge&forecelinkupdate
. This doesn't help when used on the category, though. --Stefan2 (talk) 23:12, 19 October 2015 (UTC)- Maybe :) Thanks. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 05:41, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- User:Edgars2007: You might be thinking of
- It appears the file count is not updated when a file is deleted, at least in the discussed cases. Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as hoaxes was empty but still said 2 files at Page information and in the parent category a second before I added a file as a test.[44] The count correctly changed to 1 right away. I removed the category again (without deleting the file) and the count correctly changed to 0. Google's cache shows Category:Wooldridge Monuments images did contain 10 files previously, for example File:Wooldridge Monuments 2.JPG. This and all the others are currently at Commons. Page information still claims 10. I haven't made tests to change this. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:44, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks PrimeHunter. The addition and subtraction of a file in the Wooldridge Monuments category fixed that one as well. So this definitely seems like a caching issue in the File namespace. Now that we know exactly how to fix the problem, does that deserve a bug report or is that something that is just going to have to be lived with and fixed when it comes up? --Stabila711 (talk) 20:14, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
- My suspicion is that this is another effect of phab:T115586 preventing links tables from being updated correctly. Anomie⚔ 13:10, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
- I have also noticed this when looking at c:Special:WantedCategories. That special page is now full of dated deletion categories which are now empty, but the special page thinks that they still contain lots of files. --Stefan2 (talk) 23:12, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
Article categories not always saving completely
I started noticing this a few days ago, but every now and then when I make a category addition or change to an article, the category doesn't get updated with showing the article in its list. This is even considering lag. I've had to re-save articles to get them showing in categories. Is anyone else seeing this? Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 17:11, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Please give an example (always give an example when possible no matter what you report), so we can see how the category was added. You appear to use HotCat a lot. Maybe the relevant link table isn't always updated when categories are added via the API. If this is the case then any manual edit, including a null edit but not a purge, should update the link table. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:43, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Pardon me for not providing an example, as I was initially just interested if others were seeing the issue, not making an official report. Jeffersontown, Kentucky was the last one, adding Category:1797 establishments in Kentucky. I already did the null edit to fix it, though. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 18:02, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks, that was with HotCat.[45] I haven't been active with categories lately and rarely use HotCat. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:24, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yeap, it's Hotcat. Strangely enough, from out of the blue, somebody just asked me about this problem on my talk page, and I fixed it the same way. I'll report this to Hotcat if it's not reported already. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 21:05, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks, that was with HotCat.[45] I haven't been active with categories lately and rarely use HotCat. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:24, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Pardon me for not providing an example, as I was initially just interested if others were seeing the issue, not making an official report. Jeffersontown, Kentucky was the last one, adding Category:1797 establishments in Kentucky. I already did the null edit to fix it, though. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 18:02, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- I note that MediaWiki was recently changed to put the updating of links and categories after an edit onto the job queue, rather than performing them immediately. If the job queue is being slow, that could be a cause of this as well (e.g. see T116001, particularly this comment). Anomie⚔ 13:00, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I have noticed this lag recently, just in the past couple of weeks, as I regularly clean out Category:Pages with citations using unsupported parameters and similar tracking categories. About one out of every twenty articles will remain in the category after I make a change that should remove it from the category. When I visit the article, the tracking category is not listed at the bottom, but until I do a null edit, the article stays on the category page. This is something new that has never happened to me in tens of thousands of similar edits over the past couple of years. The bug report linked immediately above has a technical but pretty clear explanation by Bawolff. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:03, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
- This is a pain in the a**. I just reverted this edit, which had put Category:Canadian table tennis players inside itself, and no matter what I do, it's still showing as a subcategory. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:15, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
- I have noticed this lag recently, just in the past couple of weeks, as I regularly clean out Category:Pages with citations using unsupported parameters and similar tracking categories. About one out of every twenty articles will remain in the category after I make a change that should remove it from the category. When I visit the article, the tracking category is not listed at the bottom, but until I do a null edit, the article stays on the category page. This is something new that has never happened to me in tens of thousands of similar edits over the past couple of years. The bug report linked immediately above has a technical but pretty clear explanation by Bawolff. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:03, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
Misreporting category size
It seems that Mediawiki has started misreporting category size in the past week or so. Mediawiki states that Category:All Wikipedia files with the same name on Wikimedia Commons is at 608, while it quite obviously is at 324. Is this a known issue? Magog the Ogre (t • c) 00:21, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- See #Categories not placing items in the File namespace correctly. above. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:08, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Category:Open SPI cases
Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Turnbull35 is in the category "Open SPI cases". The SPI is in fact archived and not in open status. According to Amalthea, according to this discussion, when this occurs (a relatively new phemenon), one should do a null edit to the category page. I did that, but nothing changed. The next step recommended by Amalthea was to notify someone here. Thanks for looking at this.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:29, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- @Bbb23: This sounds like another instance of #Category membership issues above. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:48, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- @Mr. Stradivarius: I'd completely forgotten I'd filed that report here, mainly because at least with respect to CSD, although I don't patrol CSD as often as I use the WP:SPI table, I never saw the problem again. Assuming the issue here is connected to the other, is there a resolution, an outstanding bug? I'm not good at following these things having to do with the Wikimedia software.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:53, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- User:Bbb23: You should make the null edit to the SPI case, not to the category page. I did that, and now it has been removed from the category. --Stefan2 (talk) 18:02, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
-
- @Stefan2: My recollection is I used to do that and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, which is principally why I took it to Amalthea. (My recollection also is that when it did work, it sometimes came back not too longer after, don't remember the exact time frame.) Did I misunderstand Amalthea's instructions?--Bbb23 (talk) 18:07, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
-
- @Bbb23: Yes, you need to purge the SPI page, not the category page. It's always worked that way, as far as I can remember. (So it seems that this isn't actually an instance of the category members bug that others have brought up - sorry, I should have read your original post more closely.) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:25, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- I do think there's /some/ new problem: The recategorization is caused by an edit of the page, not through a parser function or transcluded template. A null edit or maintainance task shouldn't be necessary then. Amalthea 08:59, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
- @Bbb23: Yes, you need to purge the SPI page, not the category page. It's always worked that way, as far as I can remember. (So it seems that this isn't actually an instance of the category members bug that others have brought up - sorry, I should have read your original post more closely.) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:25, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- Getting annoyed with this, so I filed phab:T117679. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:41, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Delay in displaying and filling new categories
Why do some newly created categories (eg by year) still show up as red-links, and also a new category is still empty after I have added an article to it. Eg Bocaue Pagoda Tragedy which I altered from Category:1993 in the Philippines to Category:1993 disasters in the Philippines and created the latter as it was a (non-natural!) disaster. But despite the Pagoda article now having the new category and it showing as blue-linked, clicking on the link at the bottom of the article gets the new category but it is empty! I could understand if there was a short delay until slave servers are updated with new or updated articles and categories, but this was done yesterday! NB: I found a somilar problem after creating Category:1503 in Russia, but it seemed to require a space at the end of the standard country by year template before the final brackets. Hugo999 (talk) 03:41, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
- If a page has a red link to another page that exists then a purge of the first page will fix it. See #Category membership issues for discussion of missing entries on category pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:58, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
JavaScript gadget problems
The problem I am about to describe may have something to do with Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 141#Twinkle broken? or Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 141#Pages without JS or CSS via Google, but editors there state the issues there have been resolved. Yet for me, the revert vandal, rollback, and revert good faith edits buttons that should be above each current edit 100% of the time now only appear intermittently. The RefToolbar and CharInsert also have this problem, even though all three gadgets are turned on in my preferences. Vycl1994 (talk) 06:09, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
- If it's intermittent, that suggests that the problem isn't at your end but something elsewhere is being slow - either the bits server itself or your connection to it. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:54, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
How to see what links to a particular section of an article?
I was perusing MOS:HEAD, and stumbled across the following:
"Before changing a section heading, consider whether you might be breaking existing links to that section."
It occurred to me that I know how to determine what pages link to a particular page (via the "What links here" link at the left of every page), but I have no clue how to determine what existing links there may be to a particular section. How do I see what links to a section, so that I may follow the advice given, and not break things if I fix a heading? Thanks! 1980fast (talk) 02:01, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- There is no easy way in MediaWiki to find links to a specific section of a page, so the only way to be certain is to check all the links in "What links here" individually. Personally, I wouldn't bother doing that all of that, as it would be a lot of tedious work for not much probable benefit. Instead, I would check any articles in "What links here" that you think are likely to contain links to that section, and I would also click "Hide transclusions" and "Hide links" so that only redirects to the page show up, and then check all of those redirects to see if they point to that section. User:WildBot (owned by Dispenser) used to check for these, but it hasn't edited in a couple of years. Does anyone know if there are any bots or tools out there at the moment that check for broken section links? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 05:57, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Wildbot is actually Josh Parris's. What I recommend is making redirects for sections you want to link to. This way they'll be easy to fix (made rdcheck years ago). I also have some code that'll replacement section links with their equivalent redirect if they're close enough (The Glossary#G issue). — Dispenser 15:13, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
- It may miss some links and give some false positives but you can make a blank search to get the main search form and then enter the expected link text in quotation marks like "Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Section headings". Click "Everything" to search all namespaces like [46]. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:54, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Haven't tested myself, but there is such tool. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:59, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- this is not 100% foolproof, but in most cases, using the "insource:" (don't forget the colon) magic serachword should do it. include the article name and the section name in quotes: i.e., serch for
insource:"Article name#Section name"
. e.g., to find all the links to WP:CENSOR, use [47]. i chose this example simply because it was the first section-link i found... as i said, this is not perfect. specifically, if there are any redirects to the article (*not* to specific sections), it's possible that someone linked to the section using [[redirect name#section name]], and this search will not find it. there are probably other links you will miss. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 17:32, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
- this is not 100% foolproof, but in most cases, using the "insource:" (don't forget the colon) magic serachword should do it. include the article name and the section name in quotes: i.e., serch for
- Haven't tested myself, but there is such tool. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:59, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Watchlist subpages
Is there a way to watchlist "all subpages of a given page" (for namespaces that support subpages) rather than having to explicitly and separately watchlist each subpage? DMacks (talk) 06:07, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- Not that I'm aware of. This would be a good idea for a gadget, though. The question is, what would be the best interface for it? A dropdown menu next to the star icon, perhaps? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:17, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- Actually, just putting it in the "More" dropdown menu (in the Vector skin) might be best. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:20, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- This works well for, say, five subpages, but consider how many subpages there are of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, or somesuch. Any tool would need to have a limit on how many pages could be watched in one go. Relentlessly (talk) 13:36, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- "All subpages of a given page" ought to include subpages that haven't been created yet. That's obviously much more difficult and would need changes to the core software. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:41, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Javascript puts logo with banner back
MediaWiki:Common.css was edited today to remove the rules that used to replace the Wikipedia globe logo in the corner of every page with a celebratory logo with a red banner. Thus, the logo with the banner should no longer appear. However, I'm still seeing the logo with the red banner, if I enable Javascript in my browser. The rules are no longer in common.css, but some javascript on the page adds CSS rules to the DOM that put the celebratory logo there. This shouldn't happen.
Why does this happen, and how do we fix this? I don't have enough webdev-fu to debug this. Flushing the browser caches didn't help. ?action=purge didn't help. It was suggested that changes to common.css may take up to five minutes to take effect, but it's been over 50 minutes since the edit. It is possible that what you see depends on your user preferences or skin. If you could help, I'd appreciate it.
I have cross-posted this problem from the #wikimedia-tech channel on the Freenode IRC network. – b_jonas 18:49, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- It's gone for me.. are you logged in, out, what browser, did you try restarting it ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:52, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- The stylesheet cache rolls over every 5 minutes and was updated swiftly. The module update got skipped due to a rare race condition between the hundreds of web servers. It seems the old revision of the page was effectively re-cached under the new revision ID. I've done another update to mitigate the issue for now. –Krinkle 19:23, 3 November 2015 (UTC)
- Krinkle has explained that the "module" he's referred to is the "site" Resourceloader module, which indeed loads a copy of the styles from javascript for arcane and historical reasons.
- The banner logo is gone now, thank you. I hope it's fixed for everyone else as well, if not, please mention it here. – b_jonas 10:20, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Adding Template:Main Page banner to the Mobile site front page
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Main Page#Adding Template:Main Page banner to the Mobile site front page. Thanks. Mz7 (talk) 21:07, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Move log
The "revert" link does not appear next to entries in the move log that are moves over redirects. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 02:03, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
- Please include examples in reports so others don't have to search for them. Move over redirect, Move not over redirect. I don't know why a move over redirect has no revert link. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:31, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
- After some epic archaeology in the MediaWiki codebase, it looks like this is simply due to an oversight by Aaron Schulz in 2008 (the important commit that removed "revert" links from move log entries was r33234). So you could file a Phabricator task if you would like it changed. All the same, one has to remember that the revert link doesn't perform any undeletions of the redirect that was there before. — This, that and the other (talk) 08:38, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
Recent contributions from a group of editors
Is there a good tool to track recent contributions from a group of usernames listed on, say, a meetup page, without going through wikimetrics or an education program extension?--Pharos (talk) 14:52, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
distance around .OGG files?
A minor issue, that has irritated me for some time: see the anthem in the infobox in Germany. On my display (vector skin, Firefox 41.0.2) the grey bar icon to play the .OGG-file overlaps the preceding text "(English: "Song of Germany")" - most of it is visible, but the lower pixels of "g" and "y" are hidden by the .OGG bar. I tried adding "border" to the file tag, as that is supposed to add a tiny white border around File links, but that didn't have a visual effect. What's the best way to re-arrange those 2 elements a bit to get some distance between them? Note: I found Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_64#Rendering_of_ogg_player which may be related, but the bug request was declined for a technical reason. GermanJoe (talk) 14:23, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's not just you. I have Modern skin, same version of Firefox 41.0.2. I also have IE 11. Same thing on both browsers. I also toyed around with the Zoom, because sometimes that can clear oddities. Zoom has no effect on this. No answers, but it's not just Firefox. — Maile (talk) 14:34, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
Anthem: Song of Germany |
-
- With JavaScript disabled I see another dark grey media player box which doesn't overlap. When JavaScript is enabled and I reload the page, I briefly see the dark grey media player box and it doesn't overlap. Then the box disappears and the content below it moves up to fill the hole. Then a light grey media player box appears instead and the content below it moves down, but the box overlaps the text above it a little. With no infobox but just
'''Anthem:''' Song of Germany<br />[[File:German national anthem performed by the US Navy Band.ogg]]
I see something similar: - Anthem: Song of Germany
- However, this case starts out with more space between the text and the dark grey box, so when the light grey box appears instead and moves up, it doesn't move enough to overlap the text. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:07, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's the same behaviour for me: First a darker bar during loading, which has some distance and looks OK. And then another light-grey version of the bar is displayed with the mentioned overlap problem. Java has its own set of display elements of course, but I am really not that experienced with the technical details. GermanJoe (talk) 15:24, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Java and JavaScript have absolutely nothing to do with each other. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 16:41, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- It's the same behaviour for me: First a darker bar during loading, which has some distance and looks OK. And then another light-grey version of the bar is displayed with the mentioned overlap problem. Java has its own set of display elements of course, but I am really not that experienced with the technical details. GermanJoe (talk) 15:24, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- With JavaScript disabled I see another dark grey media player box which doesn't overlap. When JavaScript is enabled and I reload the page, I briefly see the dark grey media player box and it doesn't overlap. Then the box disappears and the content below it moves up to fill the hole. Then a light grey media player box appears instead and the content below it moves down, but the box overlaps the text above it a little. With no infobox but just
- I added a line break
<br />
to move the player down a line. I then found that the United States article already uses exactly that same fix. I randomly checked Mexico and Brazil, both had the same problem and I applied the same fix. It looks like this is a widespread issue. Do we need to open this as a bug on Phabricator? It's really strange that the light-grey music player renders a few pixels too high when it's inside an infobox. In fact, I think it should probably be a pixel or two lower even when it's not in an infobox. I don't like the way it still touches the bottom of g and y. Alsee (talk) 08:18, 28 October 2015 (UTC)- Yes, please file a bug in phabricator -- a few of us are working on improvements to the media playback interface, and this would be nice to fix up properly. Sounds like a CSS styling issue, probably combining funky styles from the infobox with funky styles from the player... --brion (talk) 20:10, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
List of Wikipedians by article count
Hello, WP:List of Wikipedians by article count has stopped updating since past few weeks. Although the bot is getting activated everyday, it is not updating anything. Can someone please give this a look? I also placed a request here about the same issue. Many thanks. Arun Kumar SINGH (Talk) 07:50, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for raising this, Arun. I did some checks yesterday, after creating about 15 or so new articles, and the totals have not changed. The page is updated around 1am each morning. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 13:01, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, please also note this recent discussion at WP:AN about this topic that AKS referenced, especially the comments by ErrantX, as ErrantX's comment seem to be directly relevant to the technical side of this issue. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 18:27, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- I hope this gets resolved soon. Cheers, Arun Kumar SINGH (Talk) 05:12, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
-
- Bump. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 14:23, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
-
- Checked today and the report is still not working. Is anyone looking into it? Cheers, Arun Kumar SINGH (Talk) 04:08, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
-
- Probably not. Pinging MZMcBride as he's the operator of BernsteinBot which is in charge of updating the article. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 05:44, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
-
Hi. Right, so I'm the only person who maintains this report. This means that the report is pretty much entirely independent of the Wikimedia Foundation. It also means that if you don't ping me about the report not updating, no amount of bumps or noticeboard threads will help. :-)
I will take a look in the next day or two to see what's going on. The script has occasionally been throwing uncaught exceptions, but I'm still not totally sure why. I imagine this is related, though. Thank you for the concrete examples of incorrect stats. Those should help in diagnosing the issue and verifying a complete fix. --MZMcBride (talk) 14:02, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
Import limits
See WP:AN#Edward Sims Van Zile, or once that gets archived, see the section edited in this diff. The article had been copied from simple: without proper attribution, and someone suggested importing the other page to resolve the problem, but we had to pick a different route because it's not possible to import from simple:. Currently, the only normal Wikipedias whence we can import pages are German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Polish, plus the Nostalgia English Wikipedia, Meta, and a couple of technical WMF projects. (1) What technical barriers prevent us from importing from other projects, i.e. what would have to be changed to enable us to import from elsewhere? (2) Why was it decided to have such a small list of possible source projects? Nyttend (talk) 14:10, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- I think it was mostly limited for concerns about the quality of the content being imported (sourcing, copyright violations etc). If you can find consensus to expand the list, you can file a phabricator ticket to define additional wgImportSources. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:09, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- Note that importers can import files from anywhere by using XML files. You could maybe get help from an importer. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:20, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
- @Nyttend and TheDJ: I'm working on some code to allow any wiki to import from any other (see phab:T17583). Fingers crossed, it should be done in the next month or two. — This, that and the other (talk) 09:02, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
Main Page oldid pages lack revision info – they look like live pages
The old version (oldid) pages of the Main Page are lacking the revision info and links usually found at the top of such pages, making them look like current pages. Example: 13 January 2003 Main Page version. Is this normal?
This is also the case with the oldid pages of for example the sv: and simple: front pages, but not with for example da: and no:. --Pipetricker 15:10, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
- We change some things for the display of the main page. The info is hidden in the Vector and Monobook skins by
display: none !important;
for#contentSub
in MediaWiki:Vector.css and MediaWiki:Monobook.css. Compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=585725&useskin=modern. I don't know whether it was different previously but the live version of Main Page in Vector currently has an empty<div id="contentSub"></div>
so I don't know why we hide it. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:59, 4 November 2015 (UTC) - The Vector code was added by TheDJ 5 July 2009.[48] It may have been based on Monobook code from 9 August 2008 with edit summary "Fix padding weirdness on top of Main Page".[49] MonoBook also currently has an empty
<div id="contentSub"></div>
on Main Page. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:11, 4 November 2015 (UTC) - Archived versions at [50] and [51] also have an empty
contentSub
on those dates. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:18, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Safari not displaying images in articles
As of this morning, I noticed for the first time that Safari is not displaying images in the articles. I know Safari has WikiMedia issues, but I've had this new Mac for weeks, doing quite a bit of work on Wikipedia, and I don't recall seeing this issue before. Anyone else notice a recent problem? Works fine when I download Firefox, of course. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 14:44, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
- Works fine for me on for example Sean Combs, Normandy landings. I have Safari as my backup and normally use Chrome. I am running Mavericks -- Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 20:13, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
- Okay thanks. I'm on Yosemite. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:15, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
- It's been fine for me on El Capitan. Imzadi 1979 → 20:26, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
- Okay thanks. I'm on Yosemite. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:15, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
Has Wiki Code change Prevented saving as "Web Page Complete?"
I periodically save some Wikipedia pages to my hard drive, to have a record of how before and after edits appeared, which helps me a lot to understand template coding, as well as other forms of structure in Wikipedia.
For the last few months, however, when I click to save as "web page complete," the result does not include most of the photo images that are in the article too. Instead, where the photos are located in the article, there is complex code, but no actual photo.
This has been going on only for two or three months now. Since I don't have the same problem when I save pages from other websites, I am assuming it is the result of some kind of Wikipedia code revision. I use the latest version of Firefox for my browser and have Windows 10 OS or Windows 7, on the computers I am using to access Wikipedia. I get the same "save as" result with both of those OSs.
Wondering if this will be a permanent situation in Wikipedia, or if some pending revision of your software will enable me to save Wiki pages as I did before -- as a web page complete?EditorASC (talk) 00:11, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
- "complex code"... can you try describing that again... :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:51, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
- It works for me, except the logo is missing. Firefox 42.0 on Windows Vista 32-bit. Try saving Couch in a folder. Which images are missing? Do you get a subfolder called something like "Couch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia-files"? If so, are the images in that folder? I for example get "300px-2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartme.jpg", a copy of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartments.jpg/300px-2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartments.jpg. Can you view source (Ctrl+U) of the saved page and copy-paste the code where an image is missing? For example something like:
<div class="thumb tright"> <div class="thumbinner" style="width:302px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartments.jpg" class="image"><img alt="" src="Couch%20-%20Wikipedia,%20the%20free%20encyclopedia-files/300px-2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartme.jpg" class="thumbimage" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartments.jpg/450px-2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartments.jpg 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartments.jpg/600px-2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartments.jpg 2x" data-file-width="3888" data-file-height="2592" height="200" width="300"></a> <div class="thumbcaption"> <div class="magnify"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2009-05-16_Main_office_lobby_at_Hampton_Forest_Apartments.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge"></a></div> A three-cushion couch in an office lobby</div> </div> </div>
- PrimeHunter (talk) 13:40, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
User profile
Special:UserProfile, which is displayed when you click on the username in a mobile diff, displays just plain text with blue (unvisited) or purple (visited) links instead of putting "Edited the page" and "Thanked by" in two boxes and making the links black. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 02:26, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
- Please include in example in reports. Here is one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UserProfile/GeoffreyT2000. It sounds similar to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 136#Some sort of presentation bug in April where Jdlrobson posted when it was fixed. Today I don't see boxes at any tested wikis, except a "Talk to" box. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:15, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
Underlined links
So how come I have the "underline links" option set to "always" in my Preferences, yet the links in the article ToCs are no longer underlined? (The rest of the links are underlined as they should be). Can this be fixed, please, or do I need to add yet another hack to my css sheet? I'm using Monobook skin, if this matters. Thanks.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 6, 2015; 15:48 (UTC)
- Me too - Vector skin. Also affects Commons. Optimist on the run (talk) 16:43, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
- It's caused by Mediawiki's CSS treating the TOC as a table. It seems to be discussed in phab:T92481, but I'm not sure if that's the correct ticket or not. Relentlessly (talk) 17:11, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
- When I select "Underline links: Skin or browser default" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering, I see underlined TOC links in Cologne Blue and no other skins. With "Underline links: Always" I also see it in Modern, so the setting is able to affect the TOC in some circumstances. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:45, 6 November 2015 (UTC)