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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bug reports and feature requests should be made in Phabricator (see how to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs).

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.

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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.

Template:Multicol

Complete datafiles in need of compiling

January 31, 2008
February 28, 2008
March 1, 2008
June 1–2, 2008
July 1, 2008
July 13–31, 2008
October 20, 2008
November 15, 2009
June 26, 2010
September 2, 2011
October 20, 2011
April 30, 2012
February 5, 2015
October 12, 2015
January 21–February 1, 2016

Template:Multicol-break

Partially complete (between 1 and 23 hourly files have data) datafiles which should be considered for compiling

March 3–4, 2008
October 21, 2008
October 14, 2009
October 16, 2009
November 22, 2009
January 23–24, 2010
February 8, 2010
June 28, 2010
July 5, 2010
July 7, 2010
July 10, 2010
July 23, 2013
January 6, 2014
August 28, 2014

Template:Multicol-break

dates without datafiles that can not currently be compiled

September 23, 2009
September 25–27, 2009
October 15, 2009
July 8–9, 2010
December 24–25, 2011

Template:Multicol-end — Preceding unsigned comment added by TonyTheTiger (talk • contribs) 03:28, 26 January 2016‎ (UTC)[reply]

Are there any instructions for compiling these stats? Who needs to do it? Worm^TT(talk) 07:30, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

-( I hope that someone will be do it. --Swd (talk) 12:03, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Henrik use to run this process. His last edit on WP was in August 2014. In 2015, it went inactive a couple of times and it is quite a mystery as to who kick started it.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 11:56, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Although clunky to use, wikitech:Analytics/PageviewAPI#Pageview counts by article seems to be effective for accessing page view stats for individual articles in Wikipedia. Woodlot (talk) 13:21, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, how do we use what you have linked? Can you give us instructions, please? Once upon a time we had as an alternative the wonderful Wikiviewstats. Although it's still listed at Labs, it has not been enabled for a long time. — Maile (talk) 13:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Maile66: For example, here [1] is a printout of User:Maile66 page views between January 2, 2016 and February 2, 2016. Just enter the article name into the URL along with the dates you want to view. Like I noted, it is clunky to use! Woodlot (talk) 21:42, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pageview stats has been down for the past 15 days

Can someone please fix this quickly? Makeandtoss (talk) 00:06, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Makeandtoss: Hey, what do you mean? This example API call looks to be fine to me? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 02:13, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jdforrester (WMF): For example, here. Latest stats is from Jan 21st. --Makeandtoss (talk) 02:46, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Makeandtoss: Oh, right, that tool. I don't recommend using it, though I know a lot of people do. There's some work being done to build the information into the ?action=info page, but that's not done yet, which isn't very helpful, I know. Sorry. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 02:52, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the "about" page on that tool's site, it says "They should be directed at User:Henrik on Wikipedia." regarding questions or comments. The page also carries the disclaimer "This is very much a beta service and may disappear or change at any time." That mention should notify him of this thread, but I think it's fair to say that he's under no obligation to fix it quickly (looks like an unofficial personal experiment to me, with even less warranty than the rest of Wikipedia). Murph9000 (talk) 03:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

User Henrik hasn't opened Wikipedia in years... Well dammit, it coincides with my DYK. Why not make this tool official? Its used by alottt of people. --Makeandtoss (talk) 03:06, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The new API is official. And as James stated, a very simple version of it will soon be added to the "Page information" list. There are also several groups looking into making a new 'stats.grok.se'-like official tool using this new official API. stats.grok.se will likely disappear however at some point. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:58, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I think there is a real problem with the stats... Completely out of order and we don't know why. Rather bad, unfortunately, for Wikipedia.86.73.64.12 (talk) 10:21, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Let me add my two cents to the page view statistics being inoperative. This is one of the tools that we, major contributors but non-technical wikipedians. like and use. It would be a shame if we didn't have access to page view data. Please get it functioning again. I have no idea what an API is. I just want something that works. Smallchief (talk 02:20, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No news, unfortunately. Stats completely out of order... And Wikipedia out of order next day ? Best regards. 86.73.64.12 (talk) 11:15, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Article traffic statistics

I don't seem to be able to read article traffic statistics for any date past 2016-01-20. Is there a problem or should I wait a few more days to see the article traffic statistics for 2016-01-28 for Birdsill Holly (day of DYK)?--Doug Coldwell (talk) 12:05, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Doug Coldwell. I don't know where I saw it but I saw mention that the traffic stats database has not been updated for a while and that last week is one of the weeks that is taking a hit. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 12:30, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

According to the pageview api (https://analytics.wmflabs.org/demo/pageview-api/) Birdsill Holly had 10209 visits on 2016-01-28 and 39 visits on the day previous to that date. Keep in mind that the metrics for the pageview api are not the same as on stats.grok.se.--Snaevar (talk) 16:36, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Page view stats - somebody please fix this!

This is the third thread on this page about the fact that "page view stats" (one of the installed links on the "view history" page) has not worked for more than two weeks. The WMF attitude seems to be summed up by User:Jdforrester (WMF): "Oh, right, that tool. I don't recommend using it." He goes on to say we should be using some other tool that none of us have ever heard of, much less have a convenient link to. The attitude of the rest of is well summed up by User:Smallchief: "This is one of the tools that we, major contributors but non-technical wikipedians. like and use. It would be a shame if we didn't have access to page view data. Please get it functioning again. I have no idea what an API is. I just want something that works."

Look, folks. This is a tool that many of us use every day. Don't blow it off. Don't blow US off. Either fix the existing system, or replace that link with one that works. We are your volunteers, the creators of content without whom Wikipedia would not exist. All we ask is a system that works. To just ignore a major glitch like this for two weeks is not acceptable. --MelanieN (talk) 21:56, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What's not working? This is the same tool we use at WP:RFD and it seems to be working fine from there. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:02, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Cyberpower678 and MusikAnimal: What would it take for Labs to re-enable Wikistats on XTools and become a routine part of the Revision Stats? It's such a wonderful tool, that I don't understand why it was more-or-less deactivated on Labs. — Maile (talk) 22:06, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, User:Ivanvector, it may work for you, but for me (and apparently for a lot of us) that page only shows data up through January 20. [2] Same with every other page on Wikipedia. [3] [4] --MelanieN (talk) 22:12, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, that is indeed broken. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:17, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's my understanding there will soon be a new and far more accurate WMF-provided pageviews API. Currently the pageview stats show only desktop hits, not mobile, which probably accounts for most traffic. There's a demo here, which appears to be working. Xtools wikistats is unlikely to return to service — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:23, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I failed to read everything above... I guess the new API and demo is no secret. Why are we complaining about stats.grok.se, then? I would not trust it over the WMF API — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:28, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I moved this section from below per WP:MULTI/WP:REFACTOR. I do not know why MelanieN felt the need to post a 4th thread about the issue. --Izno (talk) 22:31, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Because the earlier complaints and requests were getting blown off and ignored. That's why. User:MusikAnimal, the reason we are "complaining about stats.grok.se" is because it is the default. It is the button that Wikipedia gives us called "page view stats". If they want us to use something else, replace that link with the one we are supposed to use. --MelanieN (talk) 22:36, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@MelanieN: Hey there. I'm a bit confused when you say "Either fix the existing system, or replace that link with one that works.". There are no official links from Wikipedia to stats.grok.se; any and all such links that you may find have been added by well-meaning volunteers like yourself. The "existing system" is fixed, covers both desktop and mobile views, and is very solid (about as reliable as the site itself; maybe four–five-nines). Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:35, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jdforrester (WMF): Is there a way to deep link to show certain article(s) on the demo? If so I can update the MediaWiki:Histlegend, which currently links to stats.grok.se — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:45, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

At last check we were not certain what was causing the problem. That tool was written by a dewiki user on his own, and then left the project, without educating the remaining users on how to maintain it. Also I am no longer a major contributor to xTools. As such I am not going to be of much help.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 5:42 pm, Today (UTC−5)

@Jdforrester (WMF): How the average user accesses page views is article Page/History/Page View Statistics. That all the average editor knows how to access and read the stats. What we want changed, is for somebody to link the new tool to Page View Statistics. Any tool. We don't care. Just link one that works all the time, please. — Maile (talk) 22:47, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)What Maile said. This is what my "view history" page looks like: [5] See those links at the top? The one at the far right is called "page view statistics". From what you say, I guess it links to stats.grok.se. That's the link that is used by the 99.99% of us users that are not technical and do not follow the techie pages to keep up on all the latest innovations. If you have a better system, one which "is fixed, covers both desktop and mobile views, and is very solid", great! Then make it the link for us to use. Don't expect us, one by one, to have to find out about it and figure out how to use it. --MelanieN (talk) 22:49, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that is set by MediaWiki:Histlegend, which we can change. There's just nothing to change it to you... yet. My guess is someone needs to write a tool using the new API. I could do it, but I use Ruby, and if I leave the project there won't be many other Ruby devs to takeover. Let's defer to someone who writes Python or PHP — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:51, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. And thanks, MusikAnimal and cyberpower, for all you do to try to maintain these things. I know it isn't easy. If I am yelling at anyone here, it isn't at you two; you do heroic work. I guess I am yelling about the lack of any help, or even concern, we are getting from the WMF about this. --MelanieN (talk) 22:57, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The link above is to a forum post announcing the API. How would a not-technically-proficient user such as myself create a URL to produce page view stats for a given page using that API? For example, Module:PageLinks can currently be called to produce a link to stats.grok.se for a given page, and that module is in turn called by several templates on enwiki (e.g. {{rfd2}}). Is there something equivalent for the new API? Or are we just at this point waiting for someone to create one? Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:59, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I think we need someone to create it for us using the new API. I will see to it that this gets done, since I know all the techy people to ask. If no one does it I'll give it my best shot :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 23:00, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, Lawdy Miss Clawdy, somebody who understands exactly what we are saying (MelanieN, you and I are seeing it the same). It's not by user, but the link for Page View Statistics that appears on each page history. Yes, yes, yes. Please someone make the necessary techno version of abracadabra-alakazam, so even first-time editors can just click on it and get the stats. — Maile (talk) 23:02, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I can make something very simple, but can't promise something as full featured as the demo they've created. If only they supported deeplinking! Seems like it'd be better to take their source and work off of that — MusikAnimal ^talk 23:08, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@MusikAnimal: The average users just want daily number totals. Everything else is frosting on the cake. — Maile (talk) 23:13, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Maile66 and MelanieN: Yes, I'm aware that some of the volunteers on this wiki have hacked in a line of links to unsupported tools as "External tools". I personally think it's pretty disrespectful to link to things we know often don't work in such a prominent way, which leads to the entirely-reasonable belief by many that they are "official" even though they aren't, but every time I point this out I get shouted down because people like them too much. :-( As I mentioned above, the Community Tech team are working to provide this information on-wiki in ?action=info; see m:Community Tech/Pageview stats tool for some details from them. On reflection, adding hacky things that don't quite work but do so well enough to reduce the demand for a real replacement might be considered a poor approach in future; really, WMF should have built a page view tool years ago. I can appreciate that you are frustrated that this hasn't yet been built, but please don't feel that you're not getting any help just because some volunteers haven't fixed things; they do awesome work, and it's no reflection on them that WMF hasn't yet managed to finish this work despite embarking on it five years ago. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jdforrester (WMF) and MelanieN: Hacked in? I don't know about that. Henrik, who ran stats.grok has been around for a decade, and his stats tool has been the linked tool since I've been around, which is 9 years. That long ago, he was probably approved to do it. — Maile (talk) 23:17, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jdforrester (WMF): I think it's pretty disrespectful of you to characterize the community's creation of tools to fill in functionality gaps left by what the Foundation fails to develop as "hacked in" and "unsupported", as much as that may be the case, in particular in your Foundation-associated capacity. A volunteer developed this to provide a vital tool, and it worked perfectly well enough for many years such that its vital function became an integral part of this wiki. I think we all know full well that if the volunteer who developed it is not around now then there's not anything any of us can do to fix it, and the Foundation's own replacement is not ready to go, so we're stuck without a stats tool for the indefinite future, until a different volunteer develops a replacement tool. But your characterization of the tool and the links to it as some sort of illicit plot is frankly insulting. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 03:01, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

We seem to be going around in circles. Let's simplify this dialog. First, go to any one of 5 million Wikipedia articles in English. Second, click "View History" at the top right of the page. Third, when the history page shows up click: "Page view statistics." Fourth, a graph will appear that shows the number of number of views per day that page has had for last 30 days -- or for any period which you wish to see.

That is the tool that quit working about January 20, 2016. We, or at least some of us, would like to see it restored -- or replaced with another tool that will tell us the number of views of that page on a given day or other period of time.

What is the answer? Will this long-functioning, easily-accessible, and comprehensible tool be restored? What is the problem with keeping it functional until such time as a better system, if needed, can be developed? Smallchief (talk 00:42, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The exact tool that has been used for so long? Unlikely, at best. And we honestly have no idea how it's still functioning, since the user who runs it is inactive. No-one else is publicly maintaining it, so we don't know who to bug. You can try User talk:Henrik, but it looks like at least one user has already attempted contact with him.

The official API provided by Wikimedia linked above provides the same raw data (you can get the raw data by looking at the documentation page, which includes some GUIs to play with). A tool providing "graphs" as with Henrik's tool is in development. --Izno (talk) 02:20, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Addition: It looks like there's a demo tool that provides similar functionality to Henrik's tool. --Izno (talk) 02:26, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well.. In fact, no news... Stats completely out of order. Without any explanation. Do you know a Wikipedia administrator ? No ! There is no Wikipedia administrator ! So, I think it's rather disturbing. Maybe, next day, Wikipedia out of order. Without any explanation...86.73.64.12 (talk) 07:39, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Image not appearing after resizing it

In Thermal management of high-power LEDs the third image (CFD LED Free Convection Heat Sink Design.gif) is no longer displayed after I changed its size attribute to thumb. Would someone kindly have a look at this to see what the problem is? Thanks, Lambtron (talk) 17:16, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The third image is correctly displayed for me. Have you tried bypassing your browser cache? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 18:35, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The 220 px thumbnail is broken for me, giving

Error generating thumbnail
There have been too many recent failed attempts (4 or more) to render this thumbnail. Please try again later.

Manually choosing a 200px version works correctly. It does seem to be a server side issue. (Hohum ^@) 19:03, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

All I see is white, except for a little black X in the top left corner. I've never seen this article before, and I get the same result when I clear my cache. The browser is IE 11.63, for your reference. Nyttend (talk) 19:04, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Dummy edit didn't help. Nyttend (talk) 19:05, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, the error message is pretty clear here. "There have been too many recent failed attempts (4 or more) to render this thumbnail. Please try again later.". Have you tried not doing any more attempts for a while and then trying again later? :) All thumbnails in that article display for me now. Matma Rex talk 21:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I tried many times at various intervals and then waited several hours and tried again -- it still won't render. Browser cache clearing has no effect, in either IE or FF. How much longer must I wait, and what constitutes a "failed attempt", anyhow? Does someone else's "failed attempt" restart the server's retry timer for me, too? If so, how will I (or others experiencing this problem) ever get it to render? Lambtron (talk) 21:50, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I even tried reuploading it as File:CFD LED Free convection heat sink design.gif (different capitalisation), but its 220px thumbnail, like the other's, fails to load properly. Nyttend (talk) 06:00, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I tried forcing a 221px thumbnail but this also results in an error message. However, the 320px version works, so I changed the wikicode to use that one. This looks a bit ugly as this file is bigger than the other ones, but it's better than seeing nothing at all. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:06, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Not displaying for me on any browser (IE, Chrome, or Firefox) on my PC. Softlavender (talk) 06:20, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Played with it in a sandbox, FF 44.0. With 320px coded (original size), works fine. Anything else, same as in the article. FWIW. ―Mandruss ☎ 10:49, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Not displaying for me on any browser (IE, FF or Chrome). Cleared browser cache and tried again 6 hours later, and then next day on another computer that has never viewed the page -- no joy. I still don't know what "too many recent failed attempts" means, so I can't even speculate what the problem is or how to work around it. BTW, page visitors will never see the "failed attempts" message; they only see what appears to be a broken image link. Lambtron (talk) 14:01, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I see that Stefan2 changed the size attribute from thumb to 320px and now the image displays. However, this doesn't solve the problem: it won't display as thumb. Lambtron (talk) 17:52, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I only see this as a temporary solution. It's usually inappropriate to hard-code the file size, and it looks ugly when one image is slightly larger than the other images. However, it was the only solution I could think of which would make the picture display in the article, and seeing a slightly too big image seemed better than seeing no image at all. --Stefan2 (talk) 20:50, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely a server side problem. It works happily as a thumb at 160px and 80px, ie, exactly an half and a quarter of the original size. I think it just that the thumb maker cannot scale this animated GIF by certain factors. But I note that the image page uses a 107px thumbnail! — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 21:01, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Lambtron: Try purging the pix cache by inserting two curly brackets followed by 'purge' (without the apostrophes) followed by two curly brackets, just before the call to the pix is made. Akld guy (talk) 22:26, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Akld guy: This won't work. Also, instead of writing that out longhand, write {{purge}} --Redrose64 (talk) 23:54, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64: Hi, it did work when the new version of the map at List of Auckland railway stations persistently failed to load after the map was redrawn. I didn't write the purge thing out because I thought it might do something funny to this page, but tyvm for the tip on writing it with tlx inside the brackets. Learned something and noted it for future. Akld guy (talk) 00:04, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Akld guy: By "this won't work" I mean that your attempt to notify Lambtron will have failed: you didn't satisfy the conditions described at WP:Echo#Triggering events. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:14, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64: I'm sorry, I cannot see what you're driving at. It looks like I did everything right. Can you be a little more specific? Akld guy (talk) 00:21, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Akld guy: In this edit you altered "Try purging the pix cache ..." to "{{ping|Lambtron}} Try purging the pix cache ..." From that I assume that your intention was to cause a notification to be sent to Lambtron. This will not have occurred, since you need to add the link in a fresh post that includes a fresh signature in the same edit. Similarly, this edit will not have notified you. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:34, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rose speaks the truth. For a more long-winded version, see my recent mini-essay at User talk:Boomer Vial#Pings (permalink). ―Mandruss ☎ 13:25, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I edited the page: inserted Purge tag immediately before 3rd image and changed image size to thumb. After saving, a Purge link appears at top of page. After clicking Purge link the image is still not displayed. Then I cleared the browser cache and reloaded the page -- image still not displayed. I've removed the Purge tag but left image size as thumb. Any other suggestions? Lambtron (talk) 19:10, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks all for making it clear. Akld guy (talk) 19:20, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Is there some other way I should be using Purge? It has no effect when used as suggested above (unless I'm misunderstanding the instructions). Lambtron (talk) 18:21, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I can only tell you how it worked for me. I asked another editor to bring his map up to date so it would bring the List of Auckland railway stations article up to date. He did so, but the changed map repeatedly failed to appear. I inserted {{purge}} on a line by itself immediately before the call to the map. That immediately fixed the problem. Didn't need to click the 'Purge' that appeared on the article. I deleted the {{purge}}. At my request, he then made several other changes to the map, all of which needed the same purge inserted. It got to the point where I decided to simply leave the purge there so that any future updates to the map will automatically be reflected. Akld guy (talk) 19:50, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The page is automatically purged if you edit the page. --Stefan2 (talk) 20:41, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes; it sounds as if a WP:NULLEDIT would have worked. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:48, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently it was the edit itself (not the Purge tag) that fixed the problem for Akld guy, because the Purge link was never clicked. However, the problem I'm having appears to be a server-side issue that's not related to caching, because neither null edits nor Purge clicks have been effective. I'm guessing that the server is timing out while resizing the image because of the large file size and high frame count, and consequently every attempt to resize is a "failed attempt". Can anyone else corroborate this or offer ideas for how to resolve this? If not, perhaps a new version of the image should be uploaded and substituted into the article -- one that has a smaller file size and fewer frames. Lambtron (talk) 04:44, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist add/remove from category

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T125171

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T125147

Resolved

Uggh, where did this new "feature" come from, any one see where to turn it off? I really don't want this in my watchlist, e.g.

    (diff | hist) . . Category:Candidates for speedy deletion‎; 00:01:45 . . (0)‎ . . ‎Legacypac (talk | contribs | block)‎ (Reddishgrays added to category)
    (diff | hist) . . Category:Candidates for speedy deletion‎; 00:01:19 . . (0)‎ . . ‎Legacypac (talk | contribs | block)‎ (Reddishgreys added to category)
    (diff | hist) . . Category:Candidates for speedy deletion‎; 00:01:08 . . (0)‎ . . ‎Legacypac (talk | contribs | block)‎ (Reddishgrey added to category)
    (diff | hist) . . Category:Candidates for speedy deletion‎; 00:00:55 . . (0)‎ . . ‎Legacypac (talk | contribs | block)‎ (Reddishgray added to category)
    (diff | hist) . . Category:Candidates for speedy deletion‎; 00:00:44 . . (0)‎ . . ‎Legacypac (talk | contribs | block)‎ (Reddishviolets added to category)
    (diff | hist) . . Category:Candidates for speedy deletion‎; 00:00:34 . . (0)‎ . . ‎Jjjjjjdddddd (talk | contribs | block)‎ (White van speaker removed from category)
    (diff | hist) . . Category:Candidates for speedy deletion‎; 00:00:31 . . (0)‎ . . ‎Legacypac (talk | contribs | block)‎ (Violetishreds added to category)

— xaosflux ^Talk 00:12, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Why are the words "diff" and "hist" not links? I want to see the edit that caused the change, and the recent edits either side of it. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:17, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like if you watch a category you get a watchlist update everytime something is added or removed from the category - while this COULD be a useful feature - it shouldn't be on without a way to screen it. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:19, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to have spawned from phab:T9148, guess I'll head to phab to chase it with an enhancement request :( — xaosflux ^Talk 00:23, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Change request entered as phab:T125171. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:27, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for adding the change request. Because I watch categories, that's all I see now! Funandtrvl (talk) 00:38, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) That is not a bad feature, but it should be separately watchable. I often want to watch the changes to a procedural category, but not additions/removals (dozens of pages per day). Filtering watchlist wouldn't really help, because I want to watch other categories for their addition/removals. My watchlist is now 80% added/removed pages because I have many internal workflows watchlisted. I realize this means non-binary value for watching, which would likely be a much bigger change to MW... — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 00:43, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Having different sorts of watch lists has been an open request for a long time! — xaosflux ^Talk 00:49, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Couple of things: If you turn on the enhanced watchlist ("Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in preferences), all the entries relating to a single category will all collapse into a single block. And also, as far as I can tell, the checkbox that xaosflux is asking for seems to already by implemented in MediaWiki but isn't being shown on this wiki for some reason. I'll look into it, unless someone else beats me to it :) — This, that and the other (talk) 01:02, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@This, that and the other: "expand watchlist to..." did not fix this for me, it did do what it said it was going to do, but did not have any sort of collapsing choice. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:11, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, wrong option; it's on the Recent Changes tab: "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist". — This, that and the other (talk) 01:16, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

See phab:T125171 for an explanation of what is going on here. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:16, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, deployment blunder - guess we can easily validate it isn't happening anymore. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:27, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Looks all fixed now. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:49, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, the config change enabling the feature has been rolled back. This is what caused everyone to see the category membership changes (as there was no longer any way to hide them). The reason for the rollback can be tracked at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T125147 ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 11:21, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all! The feature has now been deployed again! ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 00:27, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Relisting MFD discussions

Does anyone know how I can relist MFD discussions without the bot resetting it back to the original date? I know AFD has a view log or other section for the bot to catch but MFD isn't separated into separate pages like AFD is. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Abeiku Okai/Senya Beraku Akumase Festival keeps getting put back into the January 9th section and not into January 26th. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 09:26, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Legoktm: can you check on this Legobot behvaior? — xaosflux ^Talk 14:39, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux: Looks like it's added before, twice with no response. If it's going to be not that helpful, I'm not sure what we are supposed to do. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:47, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Ricky81682: I tried tweaking the location of the timestamp, lets see if it works. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:11, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It did not, I've specifically asked the botop to look at this; User:Legobot appears to be doing more overall good then the harm this is causing; if no response we can opt WP:MFD out with {{bots|deny=Legobot}} and either archive manually or request a new bot. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:53, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's a lot of good but it's been years and ignored. I don't want to have to opt the entire thing out for something this minor. Maybe I shouldn't bother relisting discussions. It's not like it isn't doable, AFD discussions work with this but I have no idea how the bot works or what it's picking up so I don't know what we can do with or add to Template:Mfd2 to get this to work. Is there somewhere else where someone with some technical skills can give us an idea? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 03:45, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Reminderbot?

Do we have reminderbot-style capability anywhere? My scenario is that I'll propose something on a talk page with the idea of giving others about a week to discuss, then I'll forget about it. It would be cool to have a template or something trigger a reminder notification to me at some future time. E.g. {{remind}} could just send a ping to me pointing to whatever section had that markup after some default interval, or maybe {{remind|5|Follow up on rename discussion}} could send that reminder text in 5 days. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 02:53, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I did propose something similar here, and I proposed it at community wishlist. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:04, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It might be possible to implement something client-side via Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats#hCalendar / hCalendar. I don't know if any browsers have built in support for it at present, but there may be extensions for browsers to provide support and a link to desktop calendar software. Murph9000 (talk) 08:19, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like something a bot could do, just about. Although maybe it would be easier to do in user / user talk namespaces – i.e. if you had a user subpage with reminders in a format which the bot could parse, the bot could then leave you a message on your talk page (triggering a notification) at the appropriate time with whatever note you specify in the reminder. - Evad37 [talk] 00:17, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There was a similar discussion in 2010 at Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_37#Reminder_bot – pinging (still active) editors from there @Hammersoft, Anomie, and Hellknowz: - Evad37 [talk] 02:55, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks— My view is that constraining this to just user/user talk wouldn't be nearly as helpful, because the power comes from being able to do it at the same time I do something else in article talk space. "Hey editors, I think this should be renamed. What do you think? {{remind}}". If I have to maintain a separate list somewhere that I have to create & bookmark & switch to, then the value prop becomes much lower vs. any number of third party reminder tools. In any case, I'll go add support to the existing proposal. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 20:56, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Something similar has been proposed for WP:Flow at phab:T88781. For example, this would let admins follow up on messages that a promotional username needs to be changed, to make sure that it actually happened (or that the account was abandoned). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Would it be technically possible for developers to make it possible to disable watchlists?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T125324

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T125325

I'm hoping someone might know if this would be possible to develop. If it wouldn't be, there's no point in my going further. If it might be, I'll propose it as a way of dealing with sockpuppets. Banned/indefinitely blocked users still use their watchlists and then use socks to edit. Yesterday an obvious IP sock arrived at a talk page minutes after I edited the article. Of course blocking notification would help, but it wouldn't work as well as disabling the watchlist. Doug Weller talk 08:51, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

All the sockmaster would have to do is have the raw watchlist, and then copy and paste that into the sock. It'd be a matter of seconds. You can see it yourself if you go to your watchlist and hit "Edit raw watchlist", and one good use for that is as an export/import function for a watchlist. I'm sure it would be feasible on a technical level for admins to have the ability to blow out and lock someone's watchlist, but I don't think it'd be much benefit. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 09:04, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, if the sock is smart enough, knowledgeable enough, and creative enough to figure that out. It wouldn't have occurred to me, and I'm a fucking genius. ;) It wouldn't help with some socks, but nothing's perfect. ―Mandruss ☎ 09:12, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There might be an idea for a new feature for CheckUser in there. Comparison of watchlists. Probably shouldn't be a general admin level feature, for privacy reasons. Murph9000 (talk) 09:33, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Comparison of watchlists: yes, that's a really good idea. -- The Anome (talk) 09:36, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Now that, I could see being tremendously useful. I don't think we'd want to allow even checkusers to see individual pages watched (that's getting into the territory of seeing what someone has read, rather than just when and from where they've logged in), but maybe return a flag if two users have identical watchlists (and perhaps a count of how many pages they're watching; someone watching only a page or two could generate a lot of false positive duplicates, but someone watching a couple hundred is pretty unlikely to). Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 16:24, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wholly agree that viewing the contents of watchlists would be too invasive. I may support a checkuser access that accepts inputs two usernames, and outputs "There are x identical entries". — xaosflux ^Talk 17:00, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Nice idea. Don't display the contents, but display the number of items in each list and the number of exact matches. For convenience I'd also add a match% figure. The math would be sqrt((IdentialEntries/ListSize1)*(IdentialEntries/ListSize2))*100. That is the geometric mean of percentage-match on each of the two lists.

I just realized that could be used to probe someone's watchlist: Use a dummy account with with test-entries in the watchlist, and use match% to test for specific entries. On the other hand Checkusers are already heavily trusted not to engage in that sort of shenanigans, and I believe Checkuser tool use is all logged. That sort of tool-abuse would be very visible in the logs. IMO that theoretical attack is probably a non-issue. Alsee (talk) 22:31, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Re Seraphimblade's point, it should be reasonably easy for there to be a button available to admins which disables the watchlist of a blocked user, and to make it such that a disabled watchlist cannot be viewed by the user via the raw watchlist. A dedicated LTA would perhaps learn BEANS ways to workaround that by planning ahead, but the vast majority of problematic users would lose access to their watchlist and would think that was the way things work. The action would need to be logged in the same way done when removing talk-page access. Johnuniq (talk) 01:32, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I've lodged two Phabricator tickets for these features that will be ignored for the next 10 years -- both are technically straight forward. That said, I've heard positive signs from the WMF that they want to look at technical means to tackle harassment and sockpuppetry and there's a chance we'll get these sooner rather than later. MER-C 04:53, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A sockpuppet could easily circumvent this:
1. Copy the contents of Special:EditWatchlist/raw from the blocked account, and insert the same text on that page for a new account.
2. Clear the list for the blocked account (so that the overlap is 0 %).
3. Don't use the new account for any editing. The new account will be a single-purpose account only used for maintaining the watchlist. Use WP:RSS#Watchlist feed with token to follow activity on the watchlist so that you don't need to log in unless you need to modify the watchlist.

However, I suppose that this could discover some sockpuppets belonging to users who are not aware of this. --Stefan2 (talk) 14:49, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the idea isn't that is will always confirm or exclude a sock, only that it may add evidence towards confirming in some cases. The useful result would be a positive comparison of larger watchlists, which should really be quite unlikely for genuinely unrelated accounts. Murph9000 (talk) 23:08, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Better get a good solid baseline rate of watchlist overlap among active editors before using any such comparisons as evidence of sockpuppetry, and maybe weight the result by total number of watchers of a given page. For some reason nobody ever seems to worry about this base-rate problem when talking about page overlaps in sock cases, but it would be much worse if the tool only provided a number rather than a list of distinctive overlapping pages. Opabinia regalis (talk) 21:08, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Qs about external links search special page

Regarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch

Is there a way to limit searches to just mainspace, or any other individual namespace?
Is there a tool to return the total number of links, immediately?
Is there a way to combine searches for http://www.example.com https://www.example.com http://example.com & https://example.com (or any pair of those)?
Is there away to automate a batch of searches (say, return the totals for five subdomains in each of 20 languages; per namespace); or someone who could do this, please?

-- Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:41, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Mw:help:linksearch: No (it only reports all namespaces). No. No, and Maybe. But forgetting you mentioned Special:LinkSearch:

For an example of how to go about applying a regexp to find external links see Help:Searching/Draft#Insource. A. (The draft is pretty much done.)

Yes. Use the new insource search parameter. As in linking a namespace can go first (case insensitive, aliased, accepts whitespace delimiters).{{search link}} can take a search domain in the form of a namespace profile, (as can the Special:Search Advanced dialog).
No. In general there is no tool or way to pattern the many possible text patterns indicating the general external link. But see T121379 comment by EBernhardson. A Special:Search of course returns the total number of your specific pattern, such as template: insource: "http www example com".
No. Logical OR is not currently available for search parameters, (as it is for words or phrases).
For searching other languages, Search can parse/analyze words in 33 languages. For batch automation, perhaps see the recent topic "reminderbot". — Cpiral Cpiral 19:21, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

See User:Johnuniq/Links to example which was my attempt to track down bad "example" links in articles in 2011/2012. That list is now obsolete, but I could generate it again. I started that due to a discussion somewhere, but I'm afraid I let it slip. That is generated by a script which uses mw:API:Exturlusage. I don't have time at the moment to work out an example URL, but it should be possible to do some manually. If you spell out what is wanted (I'm not sure what #4 means), I'll look at it within a day or two. Re #2: I don't think you can get a total easily; I think the API has to work its way through the list. You could probably effectively get a total with some SQL at Quarry, but I haven't done that. Johnuniq (talk) 01:53, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, counting links in SQL is possible and pretty easy. You could tell, which URLs and languages you have in mind. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:03, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If anyone wants to follow up on links to example.com, I have updated my list of links to example. Johnuniq (talk) 09:56, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cite vs Citation templates,, harvnb template, etc.

This edit in good faith raised some questions for me:

the substitution of date for year breaks Harvard-style citations, in my experience.
I was under the impression that the Citation template was easier to use (fewer red messages).
author-link and now editor-link work for non-harvard-style refs, but the author-link to a harvard-style brief reference would work better in the full bibliographic entry, it seems to me. This appears to be a difficulty when mixing citation styles.
It appears that cite web causes us to want to change existing refs from date to year.

--Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 05:16, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Module:Citation/CS1 extracts the year portion from the value supplied to either |date= or |year=. When both of these parameters are used in a cs1|2 template, the module uses the value from |year= in the CITEREF anchor. Generally, use of both |date= and |year= should be confined to those times when the article date style is year-initial-numeric and |ref=harv and year disambiguation is required. Can you provide an example of [broken] Harvard-style citations?

{{citation}} (cs2) uses the same rendering engine and is subject to the same rules as the other (cs1) citation templates. It is distinguished from cs1 templates by the use of commas as element separators and lower case static text.

|author-link= and |editor-link= have nothing to do with reference styles. These parameters simply link the author/editor name in the rendered citation to that person's Wikipedia article.

{{cite web}} does not care if you use |date= or |year= except that it expects the values assigned to those parameters to comply with MOS:DATEFORMAT et seq.

This conversation should continue here until completed. In future, questions and issues related to the cs1|2 citation templates should be taken to Help talk:Citation Style 1.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:04, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This citation, Smith, A. Mark, ed. and trans. (2001), written at Philadelphia, "Alhacen's Theory of Visual Perception: A Critical Edition, with English Translation and Commentary, of the First Three Books of Alhacen's De Aspectibus, the Medieval Latin Version of Ibn al-Haytham's Kitāb al-Manāẓir, 2 vols.", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 91 (4–5), Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, ISBN 0-87169-914-1, OCLC 47168716{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Books I-III (2001 — 91(4)) Vol 1 Commentary and Latin text via JSTOR; — 91(5) Vol 2 English translation, Book I:TOCpp.339-341, Book II:TOCpp.415-6, Book III:TOCpp.559-560, Notes 681ff, Bibl. via JSTOR from Book of Optics

note 44 in Alhazen, is the base for a Harvard-style ref (Smith 2001). It works in Book of Optics. But this 2001 ref doesn't work so well in the Alhazen article. Another editor used Smith, ed. instead of last=Smith so I suppose that's why the harv Smith 2001 link doesn't work in the Alhazen article. I could harmonize the citations. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 11:53, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Per the above, I tried patching in last=Smith in the citations. I got "Warning: Alhazen is calling Template:Citation with more than one value for the "date" parameter. Only the last value provided will be used." ??

--Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 13:16, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

One of the uses of the template is either using |date= twice, or its synonym e.g. both |date= and |year=. Removal of one will fix that problem. --Izno (talk) 13:21, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That error in Alhazen is not a cs1|2 error and does not occur for aliases. The parameter names must be the same. In this case the offending {{citation}} template is Van Sertima which includes |date=1992 and |date=2004.

As an aside, that template also has |oclc=123168739 25416243 29837541 44748929 50901951 56571741 57559516 – seven OCLC identifiers where there should only be one. I will fix the module so that multiple oclc identifiers in |oclc= emits an error message.

As a further aside, the article suffers from inconsistency of citation style: it uses both cs1 and cs2; it uses both {{harv}} and {{harvnb}}and either of those with and without the in-source locator template {{rp}}. Much work is needed.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:15, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Trappist the monk, Thank you for pointing out these problems. A. Mark Smith is Curators' Professor of History at the Univ. of Missouri, Columbia. Smith has labored long on Medieval Optics. My interest is in getting these citations right. I will patch the Van Sertima and the Smith refs for the problems I know about. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 18:42, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If {{harv}}, {{harvnb}} or similar templates such as {{sfn}} are in use, it should never be necessary to use {{rp}} as well, since that defeats the purpose of Shortened footnotes. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:09, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me the benefit would be a smaller number of shortened unique footnotes, since author, year, and page number could be compressed down to a named ref to a {{harvnb}}, directly pointing to an author|year for each respective inline ref. + Each repeated author, year would be lettered by a unique named ref, indirectly pointing via the {{harvnb}} link to the full {{Citation}}. + A given page would have an {{rp}} for the unique page number.

The Smith refs could then compress his life's work down to a year and page number. I will propose this, with examples, on the Alhazen talk page, before I were to embark on the update. Consider that Book of Optics is 1000 years old, with multiple translations, languages, manuscripts, books, and volumes, written before there was a Gutenberg or Risner. Not to mention the centuries of scientists who cite Alhazen. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 22:36, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I am not entirely clear on what you are trying to show, but I concur with Redrose64 that {{rp}} is not needed. Note that each instance of a {harv} template (all pointing to a given citation) can have its own page number. Note also that while {harv} templates can link to a full citation anywhere in the text, including another footnote, it is much more convenient to collect all of the full citations in single section (typically named "References" or "Sources"). ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:04, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Before seeing the latest, I proposed harvnb+rp on Talk:Alhazen#proposal.I am happy to go with consensus. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 23:27, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And looking there it appears you wanted to use a named ref to re-use a short cite (the Harv template), then use {rp} to add each cite's page number externally to the footnote (<ref>). Better to use separate footnotes, as I have explained there, with the page numbers within the footnote. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:34, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I had to put in 4 separate fixes to try to make the links to the base citation work. In these cases (notes 45, 68, 78, 116) the shorter ref to {{harv}} was the way to make the links to the base citation work. The rest was done by hand: volume, Latin para., page numbers to the Latin, to a footnote in translation, etc. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 10:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'll help you with the details. We can talk about it there. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:06, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrect page rendition of section titles and edit links at Cricket pitch

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T124356

Section titles in Cricket pitch are appearing as follows:

Preparation and maintenance of the playing areaEdit with some abnormal URL behind the "Edit"

instead of looking like:

Preparation and maintenance of the playing area [edit source | edit ]

So cannot edit by section. Whole page at top edit works fine.

All other pages I have looked at look good.

Any ideas ?

Aoziwe (talk) 12:43, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The edit links were apparently made partially with a system used for the mobile version. A purge fixed it. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:11, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, Cricket pitch#Preparation and maintenance of the playing area rendered as:

Preparation and maintenance of the playing areaEdit

The link went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_pitch#/editor/5. Compare to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_pitch#Preparation_and_maintenance_of_the_playing_area where the edit icon goes to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_pitch#/editor/5. The only difference in the url is .m. It was the same for all section edit links. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:24, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen similar on other pages in the last couple of weeks, it was always associated with the absence of an [edit] link for the lead section of that page; a WP:PURGE was all that was needed for all of them. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:24, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks all. Aoziwe (talk) 08:49, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That's a known issue. Max Semenik (talk) 00:32, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Just seen it again, when I visited Template:São Tomé and Príncipe Championships, see image top of section. The HTML for the section header containing the incorrect edit link is:

<h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Usage">Usage</span><span><a href="#/editor/T-1" title="Edit section: " data-section="T-1" class="mw-ui-icon mw-ui-icon-element mw-ui-icon-edit-enabled edit-page icon-32px">Edit</a></span></h2>

Page history at that moment had only two edits, and that duff "Edit" link was inside the documentation area (which was also visibly broken: the upper green box was finishing too early), so the only edit which could have done it was this one. NeedAGoodUsername, do you edit using a mobile device? --Redrose64 (talk) 10:51, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Drafts not showing up in category

Hi, all,
Drafts or AFC submisions that haven't been edited for six months or more are eligible for deletion under CSD G13. I've come across many eligible drafts that are supposedly in Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions (look at Draft:Andrew Essex or Draft:Anne Ellingsen for examples) and indicate they are assigned to this category but when you look at Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions, none of these G13 submissions appear.
Do you know of any reasons why a category would appear on a draft page but those articles don't appear to be in that category when you look at its page? This is happening to dozens of old drafts which are appropriately tagged but are not seen by admins who just check the G13 eligible category to see if it contains any pages. Thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 16:02, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Categories are cached in the categorylinks table. When a page becomes too old, Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions immediately shows up in the page footer, but it may take a few weeks until the categorylinks table is updated, and the pages won't be listed on the page Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions until that happens. If you want pages to appear in the category listing faster, then you could go to the individual pages and purge them with the forcelinkupdate option. I purged the two pages you found, so they now appear in the category listing, but there are probably other missing pages too. A bot could regularly search for pages to purge. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:31, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think that it was previously suggested that we send in Joe's Null Bot (talk · contribs) to work through anything transcluding {{AFC submission}} and give it a WP:NULLEDIT. Maybe this was done as a one-off: but if this was done every few weeks (but no more often than once a week), pages wouldn't be left much longer than the six-month threshold and it wouldn't tax the server kitties too much. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:58, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I don't know about forcelinkupdate but I did refresh the page/purge the cache by clicking on the clock in the upper right-hand corner (which I'm told results in a cache purge) and that didn't make any difference. The only way I found these stale drafts was going through the contributions of the HasteurBot earlier in January, to see which editors it contacted and there must be an easier way to collect these pages into the appropriate category and maybe that can be the work of a bot. It's a little time-consuming to search for stale drafts by going through them individually.

I should add that this is a recent problem, I've spent a fair amount of time deleting G13 and I know that in the fall, the G13 eligible category was FULL, it rarely had fewer than a few hundred stale drafts and I was surprised to find it empty when I first looked at it this month. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:05, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The purge link on that page only updates the page list if you are not logged in when looking at the category, I think. Logged in users should already see the most up-to-date data which is available. You need to purge the individual drafts instead of purging the category. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:14, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Double redirect bots

Has anyone noticed that the double redirect bots are functioning slower than they did years ago, especially in recent history? --Jax 0677 (talk) 16:33, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Viewing on iPhone

Whenever I visit this page on the iPhone, the text looks smaller than usual and the section headers are not collapsed. 172.56.30.227 (talk) 20:07, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I've also experienced a similar problem on iPhone, on iOS 8 and 9 (I use an iPhone 5), though it is that the TOC text headers are of varying sizes. Makes it very annoying when dealing with long TOC's. Is this a registered bug perchance? Cheers, Doctor Crazy in Room 102 of The Mental Asylum 06:33, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Lagging

Is there a way to stop underlining in the editing frame (especially if something is pasted into the code)? To clarify: if I paste anything in the edit box, a lot of text gets underlined (red wavy lines similar to this), and after that everything becomes laggy and slow till I insert any of the toolbar tool (for example, ''Italic text'' or <sup>Superscript text</sup> which clears red lines and makes everything back to normal). Does anyone know how to fix this? --Obsuser (talk) 02:03, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Obsuser: You could try disabling the toolbar in preferences, and see if that makes any difference. The problem might or might not be related to the toolbar. When you say that clicking something on the toolbar clears the issue, that makes me think that it may be worth that basic test (or that might solve the issue for you, if you don't need the toolbar). I never use it myself, so it's disabled, and I consequently don't know if there's a general issue of the type you describe. It may also help you get the best answers if you tell us which browser (and version) you are using, as it could easily be something specific to a particular browser. Murph9000 (talk) 02:25, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I woudln’t actually like to disable toolbar as I have many useful gadgets there. I use Chrome updated to latest version 48.0.2564.97 m (with other everything updated too, several days ago; problem is not recent at all). I guess it is not something checking spelling (as in MS Word) as it would be ridiculous to have such tool iniside editing frame because there are urls, non-existing-only-to-Wikipedians-known words etc.

Even if problem is related to toolbar, it is not solution to disable it but to fix lagging. Here is the picture so you can see what I am talking about. NOTE: This lagging does not happen here, when we are talking about 10 or 20 or 100 rows of code, but when I edit longer articles of about 500, 1000, 10000 or more rows everything gets slow in a way I described above.

I guess it fills out some memory caps or something with so many of these underlines. Don’t know how to edit as I cannot paste anything; it sometimes crashes all Wikipedia tabs, although data is not lost as I duplicate them and then reload.

PS Note that even If I disable toolbar, I cannot disable these insertion tools below editing frame (I presume), and if I insert any symbol (for example §) from below — it simply waits for a few seconds and clears out red underlines and everything gets unlagged till next paste. Actually, not everything: text is still being underlined but only in a *paragraph I do edit (*I guess it’s in a such or similar way, maybe not paragraph, I don’t know...), not whole code for sure as lag would be present if that happens. --Obsuser (talk) 03:12, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I disabled Use this language for spell checking in Manage languages in Chrome settings, and it should be resolved after I restart browser (cannot now because many tabs are opened). Will inform if you if this did not solve the problem, but I think it did. Thank you, my bad as it was that simple (red wavy → spelling check → just turn it off). --Obsuser (talk) 03:26, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Obsuser: Yeah, if you like the toolbar, fair enough. It's just good to rule it out as being the cause, since you mentioned it. I think from what you describe, that the problem is not the toolbar, and probably any small insertion is clearing the issue. It could well be a browser issue, as I'm pretty sure that those underlines are the browser's spell checker. Disabling the spell checker, to see if that changes the behaviour, is certainly a good choice for your next diagnostic. Now that we know the browser, hopefully someone who does use it for heavy editing may be able to add something. Murph9000 (talk) 03:34, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I still didn’t restarted browser to check, but just opened new non-incognito window where it was OK. Will inform... --Obsuser (talk) 04:25, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. It’s resolved now. --Obsuser (talk) 23:24, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Nowrap for references

Why don’t <ref></ref> tags get "locked" to the previous word? It is looking bad when⁠^[1] "detaches" from the word and shows up in the new line at the very beginning... Is there a way to fix this problem for all Wikipedias or we have to cheat and enclose it manually with {{nowrap| and }} what makes way much bigger source codes and everything nastier and harder?

Also, this should be done for words connected by a hyphen (e.g. "two-three") which should not be let to be able to get separated as in such cases additional hyphen is needed to denote word was not syllablized but actually does contain - in itself. For example:

These two-
-three guys...

is correct. On the other hand, it would be wrong:

These two-
three guys...

I’m asking it here but it should be solved if it will be for all Wikipedias, not only one language project. I presumed this adding of hyphen is needed in English because in Serbian it is to make sure word has not been separated into syllables but actually does contain hyphen and is semi-compound word, such as semi-compound is itself.--Obsuser (talk) 04:25, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is a very complex issue. My best and least complex answer would be.. Sorry, this is the web, not print typesetting.

Both issues are difficult to workaround without introducing significant problems of it's own. Also the latter is not a common rule in modern English as far as I'm aware. The real place to deal with this is at the browser vendor and even the Operating System level. Whatever we do on Wikipedia will be messy and not a long term solution. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:52, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Where would it be appropriate to ask this question (first one especially which is much more important) elsewhere? Who is responsible for a maintainance of to-this-question related issues? I know it is a complex, but that doesn’t mean it it’s not resolvable. Much more complex software-related issues have been worked out successfully for solution; e.g. thousands of bugs etc. --Obsuser (talk) 23:30, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The first one could probably be 'fixed' by automatically inserting a Word joiner in front of every single rendered reference, but this might be problematic in certain contexts (and certain languages?), but also icw older browsers and when copy pasting into other applications. This would require a software change. Feature requests like that should be filed in phabricator as mentioned in the header of this page and give 0 guarantee for resourcing towards such a thing. For the latter, I would suggest Apple and Microsoft. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:32, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Zero-width joiner (&zwj;) works nice. I might ask but nothing is going to get resolved probably. Thank you. --Obsuser (talk) 02:15, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm certain that this exact request has come up before, probably here at VPT; but I'm danged if I can find it.

Anyway, if you wish to somehow connect the punctuation (period, comma, whatever) to the ^[ that immediately follows it in a non-breaking way without adding extra markup, there is nothing that we can do, not even by filing a request at phab: - it's down to browser behaviour, so you would need to put a change request on the developers of whichever browser that you favour (Firefox in my case). Then repeat for all the other browsers that you use (Opera, Chrome). Then go through the whole thing again for all the other browsers out there (Safari, IE, Pale Moon, etc. etc.) --Redrose64 (talk) 07:24, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Aha, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#Orphan references. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:41, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I actually did try to cheat with &zwj; using Google Chrome, and it did prevent ^[1] from being "detached". It is just problem that it increses source code size + we’d need bot that would do massive amount of changes to add this &zwj; before every single <ref + sfn, harvnb and similar ways of referencing.

I’ve already posted this to phab (Maniphest T125480) before reading the last comment here; why do you think it is about browsers? I completely disagree because I guess it is about HTML code; if you use   it should work in Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc. Shouldn’t it?

PS "⁠" that someone added to my comment at the very beginning of the sections does not do the job. I see ugly box: ⁠!??!!?

--Obsuser (talk) 07:48, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve just read Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#Orphan references. It was like "solved" but obviously it’s not. NOTE: I didn’t see this today, it’s much more older issue (at least one or even two years since I use and/or edit Wikipedia).

Do you have idea why &zwj;-&zwj; does not prevent this - from being broken (e.g. two&zwj;-&zwj;three does not do the job at all)? --Obsuser (talk) 08:03, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It had degraded and that degradation was solved in several cases. Where it is not solved is probably caused either by browser/OS behavior, user error, or by non-standard styling. I have no problem with Safari on the Barack Obama page for instance... With regards to your example of two&zwj;-&zwj;three; well it's rather logical. You are defining "explicit allow NO break (zwj), explicit allow break(-), explicit allow NO break (zwj)". You can't remove an explicit line break option with zwj. You can only use it to prevent line breaks where there is an implicit option (which are mostly word boundaries) to add a line break. These are well defined rules used throughout computer standards. There is also something like the non-breaking hyphen btw. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:12, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OK. Thank you. --Obsuser (talk) 22:21, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Phab crew "archived" it, probably for around 100 years or more... --Obsuser (talk) 09:34, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-05

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

Problems

Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [6]
Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [7][8]
Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [9]

Changes this week

The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [10]
Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [11][12]
The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [13]
The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [14][15][16]
The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [17][18]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 2 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is expiring watch list entries. The meeting will be on 3 February at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [19]

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

21:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

IMPORTANT - archiving fails with blacklisted links

Header shortened. GermanJoe (talk) IMPORTANT! Bot has been deleting threads. This really needs attention! Vanishing archives are a really bad thing™. See details here. (Thread auto-archived w/o action.) 'Till this is fixed, admins may need to remove all to-be-blacklisted URLs from extant talk pages before blacklisting. Can someone inform the relevant admins? --Elvey^(t•c) 23:52, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The example [20] in the linked page is from March 2013 by a bot which hasn't edited since October 2013. Do you have a recent example with an active bot? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:05, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Just to be clear, this is not a "deletion", but an edit. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:45, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I had fixed a similar issue in October 2015, see here for my latest message about the issue (I disabled the links manually and archived the thread afterwards). The failed archiving's diff is here. If technically possible, it would be better to save the archive first, and then analyse the action's return code (assuming a failed save via bot produces a meaningful return code). Unless the save was successful, just deleting the original content without further check seems problematic. GermanJoe (talk) 21:56, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

File:FiveThirtyEight Logo.svg

Moved to Wikipedia:SVG help § File:FiveThirtyEight Logo.svg

– Redrose64 (talk) 17:15, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Google Books citation tool

Per this proposal, links to Google Books should be in https://, but http://www.reftag.appspot.com generates citation having http:// link. A message was left at the creator's talk page (here), but he isn't much active. Can someone else make the necessary changes to the tools code so that it generates urls in https://. Thanks, --Skr15081997 (talk) 07:05, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Talk page message notification bug?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T125537

I just received a notification and email informing me that a user had left me a talk page notification, but they haven't, the diff is for the last edit to my talk page (not by them), and they haven't even edited for days. They didn't message me on another wiki, there's nothing in the filter log nor do they have any recent deleted contributions, so I'm left confused. Any ideas what this was? Sam Walton (talk) 10:34, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Samwalton9: If I'm reading the history right, it looks as if the message reached your talk page two minutes after you posted here. That is indeed very strange. -- John of Reading (talk) 10:59, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@John of Reading: I got a fresh notification and email for the actual message, which all seems to have worked correctly. Just odd that I got a phantom one beforehand; it maybe has something to do with a failed edit save? Sam Walton (talk) 15:35, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The team working on notifications is keeping an eye on these reports in T125537. If you see more occurrences of it or have more information that could help reproduce or pinpoint a cause of it, please do share. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:20, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Where are the lang links to the Username Policy

I could swear there were international links to the username policies on WP:UPOL. Now they're not there any more.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 13:19, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Just fixed it with a WP:PURGE. There's nothing in the Wikidata history to suggest that they should have disappeared for some reason. --Izno (talk) 13:21, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

THANK YOU THANK YOU.!!!—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 22:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Dead Links in reference citations

Are dead links updated by bots on wikipedia? IOW am I wasting my time updating them myself? --BoogaLouie (talk) 15:45, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think that Cyberbot II (talk · contribs) will fill in the |archiveurl= and |archivedate= parameters if a |dead link= template is placed just before the </ref>. It can take some time to reach an article though. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:31, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the reply. Any idea how long it is taking on average? --BoogaLouie (talk) 16:53, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Not on average; but if you look at the bots edits to articles (not talk pages), such as this one, you'll see that it can be more than four years. I guess there's a huge backlog. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:57, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

HotCat & Toolbar Clock have disappeared

Both HotCat and the Toolbar Clock displayed & functioned normally thru January 12. After a 2-1/2-week hiatus, I discovered that they had disappeared when I resumed editing on Jan.30. (I actually made one edit on Jan. 26, but I didn't happen to notice anything awry.) . In addition, my pages no longer display an edit link for the lead section, and I am no longer warned when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes. I thought perhaps the settings had been lost in my preferences, but everything was properply "checked". I've even tried multiple times to get things back to normal by un-checking & saving; then re-checking & saving again -- all to no avail. I finally checked to be sure that Javascript was still properly enabled in my browswer, just in case that was involved in some way. Lastly, I just looked at the HotCat talk page, but nobody has reported losing it entirely. Sure would appreciate some help! Cgingold (talk) 19:34, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Cgingold: Are you using the Internet Explorer 8 browser? That browser no longer gets JavaScript support, and the changes were implemented around the timing you mentioned. Other than that I'm not sure what else it could be. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:39, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Dammit. Not that again. (Thanks for the quick reply, JD.) Yup, that's the problem. I largely gave up editing last year when the switch to HTTPS was implemented. I can live without the clock, but HotCat is essential, since most of my edits involve adding, changing, or removing categories. This really screws everything. Why don't the bigwigs running the show at WMF give a damn about folks like me who are stuck with IE8?? AARRGGHHHHHHH!! Cgingold (talk) 19:54, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Cgingold: This was announced in November. Note that Microsoft stopped supporting Internet Explorer 10 last month, let alone 8. You should very seriously consider stopping using it, given the security issues. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:57, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Crap. Don't know what I'm gonna do at this point. Just don't know.... Thx anyway for the info. Cgingold (talk) 20:16, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

From the Wikipedia point of view, the question is as follows: Is the expense (in download time and size, script development time, etc) worth it for the number of viewers/editors who actually use the browser? As time goes on, the former tends to grow while the latter tends to get smaller. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 10:43, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Page history "Thank" link

I have been seeing on page-history pages (NaNank pm) link where the "Thank" link usually is. Did something change ? or did I grab a script that might be interfering, also I thought that whachlist had a "thank" link, which I do see any more either. Mlpearc (open channel) 21:06, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Mlpearc: Sounds like a faulty script; it works fine for me. Note that "NaN" is very frequently a sign of broken JavaScript. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:27, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jdforrester (WMF): Thank you. I'll start de-activating my .js scripts to find the culprit.

Mlpearc (open channel) 21:40, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have blanked all my .js and also .css pages and the error still exists. Mlpearc (open channel) 23:26, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't seem likely but it could be a gadget. Mlpearc (open channel) 23:35, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If it says "NaNank pm" instead of "thank" then it sounds like an attempt to interpret "thank" as a time and convert it, producing "NaN" (not a number) from "th", and adding "pm". Do you have any browser extensions or features which mess with times? What is your browser? Can you try another? PrimeHunter (talk) 01:20, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, good point. I'm using FireFox and I just tried Chrome and same error. Mlpearc (open channel) 01:27, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Do you see it at other wikis like https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Example&action=history? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:55, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

At the link you posted it shows, (undo | thank) So it seems local. Mlpearc (open channel) 03:02, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it sounds like something in your acount. What is your skin? Do you see it in MonoBook or Modern? Have you tried your alternate accounts? PrimeHunter (talk) 03:32, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I will definitely try all your suggestions, I appreciate all your help, I will try all you steps tomorrow and report back here. Again thanx for all your help.

Mlpearc (open channel) 03:43, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Working fine with this account. Must be a gadget :P Mlpearc Phone (open channel) 04:08, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Using apostrophes in titles?

Is there any information about whether using apostrophes in titles will be supported by MediaWiki in the future? It would be pretty convenient for redirection from links like ''Star Wars'' films).--Prisencolin (talk) 02:36, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's not prevented by the MediaWiki software but by a setting in the English Wikipedia at MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. Admins can create the titles, and admins could remove the general block of such titles, but I don't support doing that. If you see links like ''Star Wars'' films then just fix them, e.g. with [[Star Wars films|''Star Wars'' films]] to produce Star Wars films. If a redirect was created then ''Star Wars'' films would become a working blue link but with the current software it would still render with apostrophes and not italics. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:49, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Eh, that's the kind of unnecessary piping I would hope gets fixed in the future.--Prisencolin (talk) 04:30, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Paragraph won't sit side-by-side on a diff

Does anyone know why the two versions of the paragraph beginning "Dopamine agonists produce significant side effects ..." won't sit next to each other in this diff? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 11:21, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Can't say exactly, but the diff generator sometimes gets confused and does funny things. User:Cacycle/wikEdDiff offers an alternative view that you can use by clicking an icon on the diff. It often handles such situations better, and it in fact does in this case. ―Mandruss ☎ 11:35, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OK. Thanks, Mandruss. Mmm. That Education project has some cool stuff. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Anthonyhcole (talk • contribs) 12:05, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

An extreme example is this bot edit. The only change to the paragraph beginning "A short distance to south the ..." was that a trailing space after the terminal full stop was removed. Similarly, in this user edit, a {{cn}} was added at the end of both paragraphs - there were no other changes to either paragraph, yet the second one fails to sync. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:48, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Convert template outputting oddly formatted number

Resolved

In the article Frank Pick, in the "Frank Pick#London Passenger Transport Board – bringing it all together" section, the convert template is used to give an idea of the current value of Pick's salary. It gives an output of "£630 thousand" - now this is a bizarre way of writing an amount of money, "£630,000" would be the normal way of writing this. How do I change it to output correctly? (I feel sure I've asked this before, but can't remember when, or what the answer was). Thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 15:36, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@DuncanHill: {{convert}} does not have the means to convert between currencies. It is for physical measures, such as length, mass, area, velocity. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:58, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's not {{convert}}. The issue appears to be a design decision in {{Formatprice}} which does this:

£{{Formatprice|630000}} → £630,000

Some opinions are at Template talk:Format price. I suggest trying to contact people who have edited that template and ask why it does that. Johnuniq (talk) 21:10, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, my mistake - it uses the template {{Formatprice}} and {{Inflation}} DuncanHill (talk) 21:12, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Until there is agreement to fix the template, it looks like the workaround is to use this in the article:

£{{Formatnum:{{Inflation|UK|10000|1933|r=-4}}}} → £900,000

Johnuniq (talk) 21:20, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I just got rid of the "formatprice" template, and it looks much better. DuncanHill (talk) 21:23, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Geolocate not working

When I click on "geolocate" to find an IPs location I get the following message "No scripted access. See http://cdn.whatismyipaddress.com/api.html or contact support@whatismyipaddress.com" The "alternate" link to infosniper is still working. If this has already been reported elsewhere feel free to add a link to that thread here. Thanks for your time. MarnetteD|Talk 17:32, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Worked for me. Mlpearc (open channel) 17:37, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I forgot to mention that this has been going on for three or four days so it doesn't seem to be a temporary blip. MarnetteD|Talk 17:40, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The link in my post works but clicking on "geolocate" does not. MarnetteD|Talk 17:40, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I used the dropdown tab "user" on an IP's talk page. Mlpearc (open channel) 17:43, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I tried refreshing my cache and I still got the same message when clicking on your link Mlpearc. Did you try using "geolocate" on a random IP like this? Oops due to the ec you might have already answered this. MarnetteD|Talk 17:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@MarnetteD: Maybe it's your browser ? are you able to try a different one ? Mlpearc (open channel) 17:49, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the suggestion Mlpearc. I tried Google Chrome and it worked like it is supposed to. I am not very computer literate so I have no idea what the problem is with my Firefox. I figured I'd ask in case anyone else was experiencing the same thing. Thanks again for your help. MarnetteD|Talk 20:15, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@MarnetteD: You're very welcome. I'm also not very good when it comes to browsers. I'm using FireFox most of the time and when there's trouble Chrome usually gets me through. Cheers, Mlpearc (open channel) 22:43, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Image display issue

The images in the List of shipwrecks in 1799 are currently displaying centered, instead of at the right side of the page. No idea why, but the code is correct for a right display. Mjroots (talk) 17:36, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Mjroots: They look OK to me; am I missing something? What browser are you using? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:44, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm using Firefox / Windows XP. Mjroots (talk) 17:47, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Just done a purge but still centered. Mjroots (talk) 17:48, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Mjroots: Ah, do you have a quite narrow window (or high zoom level)? The images look fine to me in Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Opera normally, but at or below 768px wide they jump to the centre too. Will investigate. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:54, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

[ec] @Mjroots: This was done in this edit to Common.css by Edokter following discussion at MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Responsive_image_positioning. I rather like the change, but it's a tad surprising at first. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is probably related to this Common.css change. What version of Firefox? --Izno (talk) 17:56, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oh great, another undiscussed change forced upon us. I tried adding the code to force the image right and it doesn't work. I've got the latest version of Firefox (38.1 or something like that) and tend to run at 125% expansion on my monitor.

Can we get this change cancelled until such time as there is consensus for its introduction or there is a preference to stop it taking effect? Mjroots (talk) 18:15, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's also ruined the display of my User Page, which I had carefully crafted over many years to get it looking just the way I liked it.

Mjroots (talk) 18:26, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jdforrester (WMF): - this change has absolutely ruined a great many articles. For example, RMS Magdalena (1948) (GA class). The forcing of the map to the centre means that the lede is forced below the map. Thus you get the infobox with acres of white space to the left, then the map, then the lede and text. Previously, the lede and text sat to the left of the infobox with the map sized to exactly fit underneath the infobox (no white space anywhere). Presumably this affects all 5 million plus articles on en-Wiki, plus all User pages with images displayed. Mjroots (talk) 18:36, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I reverted. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:11, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Mjroots (talk) 21:35, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

well that experiment ended quickly. 1 objection p00f —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:14, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It hasn't necessarily ended; although it has been demonstrated that further thought needs to be given to how the proposal will work, and how people can avoid unwanted side effects as described above. Mjroots (talk) 22:56, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Not really, the unwanted side effects are actually the desired effects. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:59, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If you're using a monitor, or a browser zoomed in, to where your viewport is <768px, you are a dying breed.

As TheDJ commented, the effects were exactly as desired. --Izno (talk) 23:05, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Many people do not have perfect eyesight (yes, me for instance) and some of those may need to take extra measures - such as zooming in. We should not be creating accessibility issues. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:56, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, a big point about this proposed change was about improving readability (also a part of accessibility) in narrow views. It's much better to reposition an image or infobox, than to have the text next to it be lines of 3-7 words long. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:07, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. User:Mjroots, do you use monobook ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:13, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@TheDJ: - No. I use the default Vector skin. Mjroots (talk) 05:56, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"the unwanted side effects are actually the desired effects" - Are you seriously suggesting that it is desirable to force all images to display as centered at all times? It is clearly not, as the description of the problems caused by doing this at the RMS Magdalena article shows.

One way of fixing this is by adding a user preference to override the forcing of images to the centre. Mjroots (talk) 06:08, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"at all times", no, as stated before, this only takes affect on narrow screens (or rather viewports), where without this change, paragraphs next to infoboxes would only be 3-7 words long (at their maximum), which is terrible legibility. If you are seeing this always.. then...u are using an ancient monitor (768*125% == 960 pixels. Those screens haven't been sold after the year 2000 if I think). So no, It is not always. For most people it is only if they make their browser window very small. Also, if you use the mobile website, then it always behave likes this, so it can be useful to help editors understand how content works in the mobile website. They would just make their window very small and they can see how a page will behave on a mobile device. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:56, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I can assure you my monitor is not ancient. It's a flat screen monitor, 1024 x 768 px. Thumnails are set to 220 px in my preferences. Mjroots (talk) 08:29, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I just learned that apparently 7,5% of the world uses similar screens (although probably doesn't run their browsers at 125% in that case, which really still would be a tiny minority). Which is crazy if you consider that since 2011 there have been phones supporting that resolution. Anyway, for the sake of the health of your eyes, I advise all of you to invest 40-130 bucks to buy a new screen.

Secondly, I guess we could drop the 768 cut off point slightly down to something like 700, where possibly it might not kick in yet for you, but still give 'some' value for other people... It's annoying however in that 768 is the value that is also used as the cut off point between tablets and phones, and using multiple values will just create more confusion I fear. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:08, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have $40-130 to spare, as I'm on a limited income. You say 7.5%, that's roughly 1 in 12 then, a large enough portion that it shouldn't be ignored. Either code the change so that it can be overriden, or you'll have to go the way of separate coding for smartphones, tablets and PCs. Mjroots (talk) 19:10, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OTRS problems

I know this board isn't for OTRS issues, but my email inbox has been filled with over 120 "ticket-creation notifications" in about an hour and at least some of them look awfully spammy. When I went to my OTRS login screen, it looked different (it said "OTRS 5") and I didn't log in because I didn't want a hacker to get my username and password. Hope it's just the devs doing their thing again (annoying as it is), and not a security breach of some kind. Are other OTRS agents having the same problem? I'm going to delete the emails unread, but it's a timesink I don't need. All the best, Miniapolis 19:33, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Miniapolis: OTRS was updated to OTRS 5 today so what you're seeing at the log in screen is correct. As for 120 emails I suspect in your OTRS settings you have "Notify me when new ticket created" and as a queue has been repopulated you've been sent an email for each ticket in the queue. Nthep (talk) 20:07, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks for the quick reply, and I'm glad things are relatively okay :-). I've been an agent for a few months, and never got ticket-creation notifications like this. Judging by the subject lines, it's another junk queue; they're all spam. I'll check my settings. All the best, Miniapolis 20:28, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Script for rating articles?

We've had a query on wikimedia medicine-l from a medical editor, very active in the Arabic Wikipedia community. I'll copy it here and point the author to this thread.

I'm trying to find a script that makes it easy to insert assessment tags into (medical) articles. The one I have found was Kephir's rater, but it's more general-purpose and multi-functional in a way that makes it difficult to localize into the Arabic Wikipedia.
Any other suggested script?

Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 01:36, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Anthonyhcole: Did you mean the Article Feedback Tool? That tool was removed on March 3, 2014. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 05:02, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No, he's talking about automatic help in adding quality assessments (A Class, Good Article, Stub, etc.) to articles. These tasks are mainly performed by members of WikiProjects, who tag talk pages of articles. WhatamIdoing might know. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 05:12, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

seems like a very good idea ( to find a script that makes it easy to insert assessment tags[21])--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 10:30, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Anthonyhcole for sharing this! Back in Wikimania 2015, someone in the hackathon presented a similar script. I did not followed up with him during the conference, and now I forgot where to find it!--OsamaK (talk) 10:38, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@OsamaK: If giving article the same class, as it's at enwiki, is fine, then I most probably can help. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:49, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This would be a substantial help! Providing such a script will result in the classification and subsequent editing of over 4,000 medical articles on the Arabic Wikipedia! The template used to classify articles will be identical to the one used on the English Wikipedia (i.e. {{WikiProject Medicine|class=|importance=}}). A dialog would ask users to choose the quality class (i.e. FA/GA/B/C/Start/Stub) and the importance class (Top/High/Mid/Low). Either fields can be left empty (but not both). After the choice, the template will be inserted into the talk page. --OsamaK (talk) 11:15, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like an interesting tool that could be useful in a number of languages. User:Ladsgroup is collecting medicine related tools. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:27, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@OsamaK: I can't write a script, but I can help in another way. I can give you a list of articles, that are both here and at arwiki and are part of WikiProject Medicine here. And I can say you, what importance the article has here. Then a bot could place that info to arwiki talk pages. You're interested? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:44, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have written such a bot. We are using it to track popular Arabic medical articles (i.e. we define an Arabic 'medical article' as an article that has an English version that is part of the English WikiProject Medicine). As for the importance, it cannot be imported from the English Wikipedia as it is, because the current classification used in the English Wikipedia is not really based on specific criteria. For that reason, a script is needed that would enable eager contributors to classify the articles without worrying about the wikitext.--OsamaK (talk) 18:42, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I use Kephir's rater. User:Kaldari wrote something similar, and there are bots listed in Category:Autoassessment bots that can assess articles, usually by copying the rating that another WikiProject already gave it. You might find other tools or ideas at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Technical notes.

User:EpochFail and User:Nettrom also have a script for m:Research:Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality that can estimate the class (e.g., stub) that is IMO accurate enough to automatically tag Stub- and usually Start-class articles. (When you get into the higher levels and/or lower probability, it tends to over-rate articles that contain long lists or large numbers of references.) If you have tech skills, then I encourage you to look into integrating this tool, as it would make an excellent basis for a first effort. Your volunteers could then review the ratings at their leisure and/or as articles get expanded over time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:42, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Anthonyhcole: My script is much simpler than Kephir's and probably easier to localize: User:Kaldari/assessmentHelper.js. Kaldari (talk) 01:48, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Re. my work with User:Nettrom to predict article class, see m:ORES. For example, this URL scores the most recent revision of Waffle (oldid=702406275): https://ores.wmflabs.org/scores/enwiki/wp10/702406275 As WhatamIdoing notes, the system is not perfect, but it should be useful. We're actively working toward increasing its fitness. Please add m:ORES to your watchlist to get updates. :) --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 02:05, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Phabricator is down

>>> UNRECOVERABLE FATAL ERROR <<<

Call to undefined method AlmanacCreateClusterServicesCapability::getPhobjectClassConstant()

/srv/phab/phabricator/src/applications/policy/capability/PhabricatorPolicyCapability.php:18


┻━┻ ︵ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ︵ ┻━┻

I'd better report that in Phabr... Oh. —LX (talk, contribs) 06:50, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, I reported it to tech operations earlier. Also, FYI, when something crashes on the WMF side, you can also let them know on #wikimedia-tech ^connect. Titoxd^(?!?) 07:31, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It was down for about about one and a half hour, but is now back. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:40, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

How to use wiki markup to make a colored border around a single image?

Example. Thanks.--Парис "Анима" надаль (talk) 11:35, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Not possible using wiki markup; such borders can only be done in HTML/CSS. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:56, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

By means of Template:Multiple_image#with_background_color it is possible to do the coloured borders at a few images. Can in somewise also to designate the coloured borders for one image? Thanks.--Парис "Анима" надаль (talk) 12:46, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Is information Previewed stored anywhere (Concern about Copyright)

If the text AB AC AD AE is under copyright and that text is previewed in an article and then replaced with something else, is "AB AC AD AE" ever stored on the Wikipedia servers and would it cause a problem with infromation under copyright being stored on Wikipedia?Naraht (talk) 14:21, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It is stored, but all such storage is of transient nature (caching). The safe harbor protections of copyright law in the USA specifically protect us from any problems with this, so it is safe. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:50, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank You.Naraht (talk) 17:50, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes Men article displays incorrectly if Javascript disabled in browser

This page: The_Yes_Men

I've left a note on the article's talk page with my browser version and a fuller description. I'm using Trisquel 7. Clark42 (talk) 16:44, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The template {{Anti-consumerism}} had been broken by transcluding another which is not meant for the sidebar. Removed it and purged the page and it seems OK now.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 17:09, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist options - hide page categorisation

There's a new tick box in the watchlist options to hide page categorisations. Unticking it seems to make no difference - when the watchlist is refreshed or returned to from another page, it is once again ticked. What is the box for and why can it not successfully be unticked? DuncanHill (talk) 00:51, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@DuncanHill: None of those checkboxes are persistent, they're all for single/short-term use. You probably want the box labelled "Hide categorization of pages" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist. --Yair rand (talk) 01:19, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(Sorry, I just realized I probably misunderstood your question. Maybe ask on phabricator.) --Yair rand (talk) 01:20, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, unticking it on Prefs makes it stay unticked on the watchlist page, so that's part of it answered. What's phabricator? DuncanHill (talk) 01:37, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, I think the new feature of seeing page categorizations of watched categories in my watchlist is a good thing, except for some very high-traffic categories, e.g. Category:Living people, where I only want to see edits to the category page and its talk page. Is that possible? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:49, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

So, does this having the box unticked mean that I will see when a page is added to a category which is on my watchlist? DuncanHill (talk) 03:20, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. That was first on automatically and drove people nuts. It's helpful for me for things like the speedy deletion categories which would I advise all admins to add to their watchlists if they turn it on. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 03:40, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, excellent, thank you. I remember it being requested several years ago. Does it also tell you when a page is removed from a category? That would be useful to spot people sneakily emptying a category before proposing it for deletion. DuncanHill (talk) 03:55, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@DuncanHill: Yes, my watchlist has both category additions and removals. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:16, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Michael Bednarek: No, not yet. Per-category configuration is requested at phab:T109759. I won't be using this feature until that is implemented. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:16, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Edits not showing up

I just found some refs for a draft I have in userspace, and added them. But...they didn't appear, although I know I clicked save, and I didn't get the little "success, your edit was saved!" bubble till a couple of minutes later. It's sort of annoying. Did anybody else have this, or is it a problem with me alone? White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 02:07, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think there was a database lag. I had a notice on my contributions page that it was like 40 seconds off but it seems to have caught up. Probably some big change to a template or something. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 03:41, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

{{reflist|2}} produces unwanted spaces when there's only one reference

In this old version of The Dark Forest, there's a {{reflist|2}} but only one reference. This produces an artificial space between any two words in the ref depending on the width of the browser. I realize that this is arguably a misuse of {{reflist|2}} but thought someone would like to know. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 04:29, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Orange Suede Sofa: Yes, we know. It works as expected. The list just gets splitted into two parts, system doesn't care how much references there are. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:36, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A question about tables

Is there a way to make a 2-column table where the left and right columns are the same width. The template in the toolbar above the edit window varies the width of each column to achieve a uniform column length, like this: (I've added John's suggested fix, now.) --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:31, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Original version	Current version
Parkinson's disease (PD), also known as idiopathic or primary parkinsonism, hypokinetic rigid syndrome, or paralysis agitans, is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system mainly affecting the motor system. The motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease result from the death of dopamine-generating cells in the substantia nigra, a region of the midbrain. The causes of this cell death are poorly understood. Early in the course of the disease, the most obvious symptoms are movement-related; these include shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement and difficulty with walking and gait. Later, thinking and behavioral problems may arise, with dementia commonly occurring in the advanced stages of the disease, and depression is the most common psychiatric symptom. Other symptoms include sensory, sleep and emotional problems. Parkinson's disease is more common in older people, with most cases occurring after the age of 50; when it is seen in young adults, it is called young onset PD	Parkinson's disease (PD, also known as idiopathic parkinsonism) is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system. Many of the motor symptoms of PD result from the loss of pigmented dopamine-generating cells in the substantia nigra, a region of the midbrain. The causes of this cell death are poorly understood. A progressive reduction in the speed and amplitude of voluntary movement is the only physical sign present in all patients and is responsible for the common early complaints of loss of dexterity, writing difficulties, clumsiness and difficulty walking. Muscular stiffness of the limbs and trunk are also common. Trembling of one limb at rest, although not necessarily present in all cases, is the commonest symptom leading to accurate diagnosis. Dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system is also common leading to constipation, swallowing and bladder problems and disturbed temperature regulation with excessive sweating. Depression may be an early sign of the disease and frequently develops as a reaction to increasing disability and social isolation. In elderly patients there is an increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. Parkinson's disease is more common in older people, with most cases occurring after the age of 60; when it is seen under the age of 45 years, it is called young onset PD.

--Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:15, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. If you change the header line to ! style="width:50%" | Original version!! style="width:50%" | Current version you should see two columns of the same width. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:18, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks John. I replaced the header and it worked. Is there a way to get the shorter block of text to start at the top, rather than being centered in the column? (I'm, obviously, trying to replicate a diff without all the wiki-markup showing.) --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:26, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I added style="vertical-align: top;" to table. You may wish also read this, but of course you can ask your questions here. Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:39, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 698: / Line 698: @@
 |-
 ! style="width:50%" | Original version!! style="width:50%" | Current version
+|- style="vertical-align: top;"
-|-
 |Parkinson's disease (PD<span style="background:#FAE4B1">)</span>, also known as idiopathic <span style="background:#FAE4B1">or</span> primary parkinsonism<span style="background:#FAE4B1">, hypokinetic rigid syndrome, or paralysis agitans, </span>is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system <span style="background:#FAE4B1">mainly affecting</span> the <span style="background:#FAE4B1">motor system. The</span> motor symptoms of <span style="background:#FAE4B1">Parkinson's disease</span> result from the <span style="background:#FAE4B1">death</span> of dopamine-generating cells in the substantia nigra, a region of the midbrain. The causes of this cell death are poorly understood. <span style="background:#FAE4B1">Early</span> in the <span style="background:#FAE4B1">course</span> of the <span style="background:#FAE4B1">disease</span>, the <span style="background:#FAE4B1">most obvious symptoms</span> are <span style="background:#FAE4B1">movement-related; these include shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement and difficulty with walking and gait. Later, thinking and behavioral</span> problems <span style="background:#FAE4B1">may arise,</span> with <span style="background:#FAE4B1">dementia commonly occurring in the advanced stages</span> of the disease<span style="background:#FAE4B1">,</span> and <span style="background:#FAE4B1">depression is the most common psychiatric symptom. Other symptoms include sensory, sleep and emotional problems</span>. Parkinson's disease is more common in older people, with most cases occurring after the age of <span style="background:#FAE4B1">50</span>; when it is seen <span style="background:#FAE4B1">in young adults</span>, it is called young onset PD ||Parkinson's disease (PD, also known as idiopathic parkinsonism<span style="background:#C6E9EB">)</span> is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system<span style="background:#C6E9EB">. Many of</span> the motor symptoms of <span style="background:#C6E9EB">PD</span> result from the <span style="background:#C6E9EB">loss</span> of <span style="background:#C6E9EB">pigmented</span> dopamine-generating cells in the substantia nigra, a region of the midbrain. The causes of this cell death are poorly understood. <span style="background:#C6E9EB">A progressive reduction</span> in the <span style="background:#C6E9EB">speed and amplitude of voluntary movement is</span> the <span style="background:#C6E9EB">only physical sign present in all patients and is responsible for the common early complaints of loss of dexterity, writing difficulties, clumsiness and difficulty walking. Muscular stiffness of</span> the <span style="background:#C6E9EB">limbs and trunk</span> are <span style="background:#C6E9EB">also common. Trembling of one limb at rest, although not necessarily present in all cases, is the commonest symptom leading to accurate diagnosis. Dysfunction</span> of <span style="background:#C6E9EB">the autonomic nervous system is also common leading to constipation, swallowing</span> and <span style="background:#C6E9EB">bladder</span> problems <span style="background:#C6E9EB">and disturbed temperature regulation</span> with <span style="background:#C6E9EB">excessive sweating. Depression may be an early sign</span> of the disease and <span style="background:#C6E9EB">frequently develops as a reaction to increasing disability and social isolation. In elderly patients there is an increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia</span>. Parkinson's disease is more common in older people, with most cases occurring after the age of <span style="background:#C6E9EB">60</span>; when it is seen <span style="background:#C6E9EB">under the age of 45 years</span>, it is called young onset PD.
 |} --[[User:Anthonyhcole|Anthonyhcole]] ([[User talk:Anthonyhcole|talk]] · [[Special:Contributions/Anthonyhcole|contribs]] · [[Special:EmailUser/Anthonyhcole|email]])  07:15, 5 February 2016 (UTC)
 :Yes. If you change the header line to <code><nowiki>! style="width:50%" | Original version!! style="width:50%" | Current version</nowiki></code> you should see two columns of the same width. -- [[User:John of Reading|John of Reading]] ([[User talk:John of Reading|talk]]) 07:18, 5 February 2016 (UTC)
 ::Thanks John. I replaced the header and it worked. Is there a way to get the shorter block of text to start at the top, rather than being centered in the column? (I'm, obviously, trying to replicate a diff without all the wiki-markup showing.) --[[User:Anthonyhcole|Anthonyhcole]] ([[User talk:Anthonyhcole|talk]] · [[Special:Contributions/Anthonyhcole|contribs]] · [[Special:EmailUser/Anthonyhcole|email]])  07:26, 5 February 2016 (UTC)
+:::I added <code><nowiki> style="vertical-align: top;"</nowiki></code> to table. You may wish also read [[Help:Table|this]], but of course you can ask your questions here. '''[[User:Edgars2007|<span style="color:#FF6600;">Edgars2007</span>]]''' <small>([[User talk:Edgars2007|talk]]/[[Special:Contributions/Edgars2007|contribs]])</small> 07:39, 5 February 2016 (UTC)