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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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Print/Export as pdf does not render tables

I've seen some chatter in the archives about the failure to render infoboxes, but it seems to me that the problem is much more widespread than that. I have looked around and every WP article with tables that I have checked have had the tables excluded in the .pdf print/export version. That is to say, after looking around, I have yet to find ANY tables that are rendered in the .pdf generated by print/export. Yes, there are many articles without tables, nevertheless, many articles include critical information in the articles and the lack of tabular information renders (pun intended) the .pdf nearly worthless. This is a widespread problem that IMHO should be prioritized relatively high. Examples are easy to find:

Go to your own favorite corner of WP and if you find tables, you will find this bug. YBG (talk) 05:08, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Known issue. See T87499 which was merged into T73808. -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:05, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
Great! Much appreciated. YBG (talk) 06:16, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
Help:Download as PDF --  Gadget850 talk 14:49, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Infobox subheader shift?

In Jacques Brel, my eye gets the impression that the infobox header (the colored bar with text 'Jacques Brel') is asymmetrical: lefthand whitespace looks like 3px, righthand ws 2px. I'm using Firefox 35 (not 36 yet) now. Possibly related: #Tables_just_changed_.28using_monobook.29. Is it just my eye, or is this real? -DePiep (talk) 20:49, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Not sure, was the dress white/gold for you today or black/blue ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:33, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Team white and gold! --MZMcBride (talk) 22:15, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

In Jacques Brel, my eye gets the impression that the infobox header (the colored bar with text 'Jacques Brel') is asymmetrical: lefthand whitespace looks like 3px, righthand ws 2px. I'm using Firefox 35 (not 36 yet) now. Possibly related: #Tables_just_changed_.28using_monobook.29. Is it just my eye, or is this real? -DePiep (talk) 22:13, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Moving over a salted page (redux)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T91129

I'd like to revive this thread.

Summary: When an admin moves a page to a salted target, there is no warning that the page is salted. (I tested it myself and saw no warning.) I'm not sure if the target remains salted.

Case in point: [1], [2]

A warning box would have made User:Necrothesp aware of an old AfD. He then would likely have made others aware of that at the new AfD.

Can this be fixed? Bug report? Thoughts? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 01:09, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

To your q "I'm not sure if the target remains salted", no - because salt can only be applied to the title of a non-existent page; once a page is moved to that title, it's no longer the title of a non-existent page. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:08, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Hi, Redrose64. I see. And if it is deleted again? Is the redlink then salted again for non-admins? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 21:51, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
No, it's not; and I've just confirmed it at User:Cryptic/test1 (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs). —Cryptic 22:02, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, Cryptic. So, how do we get this fixed. This is the second post about this, and it seems to be getting just as ignored as the first one. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 22:06, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Posted at phab:T91129
Anna Frodesiak (talk) 22:34, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

username change, and now I can't log in!!!

I asked for a username change from EmeraldRS to Emerald-wiki. It says the change has been carried out but I can't log in with my old or new username. I get a message with the new username saying my account is being renamed or merged. Is there some step that got missed? Help! 80.176.153.231 (talk) 17:35, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

The rename was an hour ago [3] and your account has nearly 1000 edits in total. Try again later. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:52, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

I have waited, it is now about 15 hours since the rename, but still I can't login. Are you sure it is just a matter of waiting and not that something else needs fixing? 80.176.153.231 (talk) 08:49, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

I think it should have worked by now. What exactly happens if you try to log in as Emerald-wiki? If you get a message then quote it precisely. Can you log in at meta: or wikisource:? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:01, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

When I try to log-in the message says "Login error/ Your account is currently being renamed or merged./ View the status", clicking 'View the status' shows the Global rename progress with everything 'Done' except de.wikipedia.org which is 'Queued' and has been for approaching 24 hours. I get exactly the same thing at Meta, Wikisource and Commons. I have never used de.wikipedia.org and, not speaking German, probably never will. I hope you can help. 80.176.153.231 (talk) 14:23, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Apparently the global renaming process is still waiting for de.wikipedia to be completed. That's one of the downsides of global accounts: if one local instance is delayed or interrupted I suppose you can't use your account at all. It looks like you'll have to wait for the German queue to finish. De728631 (talk) 14:36, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
Okay, thanks, I'll wait. I changed my username once before, that time it happened so fast it surprised me - within 5 mins of submitting my request it had happened, I hadn't even got as far as logging out. This time it is really, really slow! 80.176.153.231 (talk) 14:40, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

It seems the hold-up has been identified. Can I take over the other Emerald-wiki on DE or choose another username - bearing in mind that I can't login anymore?80.176.153.231 (talk) 15:22, 28 February 2015 (UTC) I should say that the Emerald-wiki on DE in January is nothing to do with me. I was EmeraldRS or my previous username, which unwisely was my real name 80.176.153.231 (talk) 15:26, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't know the reason for the de hold-up but I definitely think the de account is yours, created when you were EmeraldRS and part of the rename. Special:CentralAuth/Emerald-wiki shows it belongs to the global account, and was created at a time where you were also created at other wikis. If you are logged in at another wiki and visit any page at a Wikimedia wiki which is part of the global login system then your account is automatically created there. de:Special:Logs/Emerald-wiki confirms it was an automatic creation. https://tools.wmflabs.org/quentinv57-tools/tools/sulinfo.php?username=Emerald-wiki also says there are no unattached acccounts. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:41, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

I'll just keep waiting then!!! I wish I did know German to ask a question on one of their help talks!80.176.153.231 (talk) 15:48, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Hi there (thanks for the ping, xeno). We'll get that fixed for you. Sorry for the hold up, that's not normal. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 03:36, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
 Done - Legoktm unlocked the account and hopefully fixed the issue. You should be able to log in to your account. If you have any future problems getting locked out, please feel free to contact me directly. You can find my contact information on my userpage. Again, sorry for the trouble. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 03:58, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks everyone. Got up this morning and the first thing I tried was logging in to Wiki - straight in, no problem - great!! Richard Emerald (talk) 10:41, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

AfD stats tool not recognising votes for me

Is there any reason why this is only counting my noms, and not my vote at AfD? --Fauzan✆ talk✉ mail 16:04, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

My contributions in Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion/* --Fauzan✆ talk✉ mail 16:13, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
Which (diff) vote are you referring to? Nakon 04:02, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Nakon, I mean the voting matrix shows only my nominations, and not the 50 other votes at AfD. The tool is not recognizing my votes at AfD, which it should. --Fauzan✆ talk✉ mail 08:23, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

NCMEC template

I recently created a template for a link to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which would be used on missing persons pages, but I can't get the URL to work. I created it after I saw Template:Find a Grave. Here is my template page: Template:NCMEC. Here is a page that it is used on: Michaela Garecht and here is a URL to a poster: [4]. I'm hoping someone could help with this issue, as the formatting works perfectly with my template for unidentified persons on the website (see Template:NCMEC UID. Thanks, --GouramiWatcher(?) 17:04, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't know the website. Is there a reason the template says NCMU instead of NCMC the second time? Your example works if it's changed to NCMC. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:26, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
"NCMU" is used with the unidentified people. The missing children's URLs have the "NCMC." --GouramiWatcher(?) 20:12, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
But why does Template:NCMEC only choose a url with NCMC if there is an author, date or accessdate parameter, and another url with NCMU if there isn't? None of those parameters sound like they have something to do with unidentified people versus missing children. It seems a very odd system, and I think it's an extremely poor idea to make an external link template which changes the url if an accessdate is added. That means a user may test the link, find it works, add an accessdate, and that action may break the link without the user rechecking it. Additionally, the NCMC case is coded wrong and needs fixing but I would like to first understand the idea behind the whole NCMC/NCMU choice. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:51, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
Changed NCMU to NCMC as per PrimeHunter and it seems to pull the poster just fine then, but the concerns above remain & are on point.

Oh I think I get the premise now, the first incarnation is for use as a citation for inline refs and the second is for standalone usage (still doesn't quite add up however). -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:03, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Maybe that's the intention. All current uses of both templates are in external links sections and none of them use any of the parameters which invoke the first incarnation. The OP said "the formatting works perfectly" about Template:NCMEC UID, but that template also changed the url (although only by adding '=') if any of author, date or accessdate were added. In all cases I tested, this broke the link. I guess it was simply never tested and '=' should just be removed from the url in both templates, in addition to your change of NCMU, and an addition of a missing pipe. I made these changes [5][6] and both templates now give working links in both incarnations:
  • Dana Point Jane Doe at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
  • "Dana Point Jane Doe". NCMEC. Retrieved March 1, 2015.
  • Michael Hughes at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
  • "Michael Hughes". NCMEC. Retrieved March 1, 2015.
PrimeHunter (talk) 00:52, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for your assistance! Sorry if I confused anyone! --GouramiWatcher(?) 03:30, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

What's going to happen next with Tables?

As someone who works with wikitables all the time I am very unhappy with the padding change. Most of the time I am working on wikipedia I work on results tables (Most of the time motorsport results tables). Those result tables need to be tight so you can put 20-sometimes 56 or more races in one table. Example: Dave Marcis. Now that the padding has changed (doubled) these result tables are way bigger than they should be. This makes them harder too reed and untidy. I really don't understand why the padding has doubled. This affect every single table on wikipedia. I am really disappointed and upset that this affects all the hard work I have put in to create all these results tables. What's going to happen next? I mean the padding being doubled is'nt a minor change. Particularly when this affects almost all the tables on wikipedia. Is their a possibility that this change is going to be reverted? Jahn1234567890 (talk) 15:59, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Have you commented at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rMW33cfd0bc4a5f009b86c40b0312b4c7f7b006cbc7? --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:08, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Using qqx as default language

We can append &uselang=qqx to an url to get the interface messages name, but what can we do when one wants to get the interface message names also when submitting requests ? I don't see qqx in the language selector in preferences. Cenarium (talk) 19:50, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

What do you mean by "when submitting requests" - is this editing a page? If so, the URL will already include a question mark at some point earlier than (but not necessarily immediately before) the action=edit; there can be only one of these, so leave that alone, and append &uselang=qqx to the right-hand end of the URL. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:56, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
The question is about cases where a displayed message doesn't just depend on the current url but also on what you just did, for example move a page. Adding uselang=qqx does not always reproduce the right situation and message. If you want to find the used MediaWiki messages in such situations then there are tips at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 131#What interface page is used for the results after a successful undeletion? PrimeHunter (talk) 20:52, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. Yes, it was when I was moving a page. There are some useful tips, though it may make things easier if the non-overriden default messages (for the site language only, like AllMessages) were indexed when searching mediawiki namespace.  Cenarium (talk) 21:55, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
C: Indeed. This is phabricator:T22858. If you have a clone of mediawiki/core.git, "git grep" is probably fastest. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:00, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Why do we have the secure link icon only for red links: Red link example and logged in secure. --  Gadget850 talk 21:47, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. Internal red links have never had a secure link icon, as far as I know. I don't see an icon next to red link example using Vector or Monobook over HTTPS. Maybe you can provide additional details about your setup or a screenshot? --MZMcBride (talk) 21:57, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Must be me, not seeing it logged out. --  Gadget850 talk 22:13, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Something in my JS. Possibly User:Anomie/linkclassifier. --  Gadget850 talk 22:20, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
I'm not seeing a secure link icon, but I am seeing the small WP:SKYBLUELOCK for that particular link thanks to User:Anomie/linkclassifier. Something random like slkndkfoewgfoiwenbgflksgewe that isn't create-protected isn't showing any icon here. Anomie⚔ 23:27, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

[Global proposal] m.Wikipedia.org: (all) Edit pages

MediaWiki mobile

Hi, this message is to let you know that, on domains like en.m.wikipedia.org, unregistered users cannot edit. At the Wikimedia Forum, where global configuration changes are normally discussed, a few dozens users propose to restore normal editing permissions on all mobile sites. Please read and comment!

Thanks and sorry for writing in English, Nemo 22:32, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I was checking something in the Lyndon B. Johnson article, and saw that the link on his father, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., was red. Yet, when I hovered over the link, PopUps showed me that there is in fact an article on Samuel. But the link was red, and I still got the "(page does not exist)" title-text. The Samuel article has existed for years, so it's not one of those situations where it was recently created and the backlink colors haven't changed yet. I purged the page, and that seems to have fixed the problem, at least for me. Here's a screengrab. Is this a known issue? I skimmed Phabricator but didn't see anything similar. — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 02:27, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

The page history of Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. shows it was moved to that title one minute after Lyndon B. Johnson was last edited, so it was just a normal red link cached at that time. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:50, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Ah, that explains it. I should've noticed. Thanks. — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 06:21, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Signpost app

Hello all,

As you may know there is a Wikipedia Signpost Mobile App for Android. It's currently borked, but the source code is on GitHub. We're doing a lot of organizational work at the moment and the mobile app is one of the things we'd like to look into: we're looking into technical improvements behind-the-scenes and we'd like to take the opportunity to more tightly integrate mobile access into things.

The Android project is likely to be fixed soonish; would anyone be interested in working on porting the Signpost mobile app to iOS, or know someone that they think might interested in such a project? ResMar 05:40, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Editnotice permissions by namespace

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

We are currently restricting editnotice editing via the MediaWiki:Titleblacklist by blocking creation and edits to: Template:Editnotices\/.* <noedit|errmsg=titleblacklist-custom-editnotice>. What technical options can be used to allow creating/editing of notices in the Wikipedia: / Wikipedia_talk: namespaces by standard editors? — xaosflux Talk 16:08, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I attempted a more-specific whitelist entry, but either have a syntax error or the software needs exact match on WL-->BL. — xaosflux Talk 16:12, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Why not just remove the title blacklist entry altogether? It's clearly a hack and it has always been very dubious. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:49, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
That is an option, and I plan on opening up a RfC on changing these--but want to know what the technical options are first. — xaosflux Talk 20:06, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Haha if you do I'll be sure to add "caused an RfC" to my list of...things accidentally achieved, I guess? ResMar 20:09, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
It is the standard way to do this type of change, this isn't like a normal unprotection discussion as it applies to a feature of most every page - I'm sure the arguments are vandals - but there may be something else. — xaosflux Talk 20:11, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
  • It isn't just vandals, it's also intended to avoid displaying off-putting messages to new users (probably other reasons as well, but this one is likely the most important). Editnotices aren't as visible as page content, and furthermore are often hidden by experienced users, so inappropriate changes to these can be easily missed. Lowering the requirement to edit existing editnotices in project namespace to 'autoconfirmed' may be acceptable, provided all the editnotices for project pages that are potentially edited by new users (like the help desk and so) are template-protected (this should number in the dozens). Creation should still be restricted since it is also intended to avoid an unchecked proliferation of editnotices. I've personally seen on numerous occasions editnotices incredibly BITEY, uncalled for or not assuming good faith. So we'd better be conservative in our approach to these user interface messages. Using the title blacklist is a hack for sure but it's all we've got now barring sysop-only. If this is still desired, we may have to rewrite the editnotice template so that it uses a Editnotices/Page/Namespace/UnprefixedTitle format, where mainspace is "main", so e.g. "Editnotices/Page/Main/Barack Obama" or "Editnotices/Page/Wikipedia talk/Help desk". Although it would cost a few hundreds of moves, this way it's going to be easy to make special cases on namespace using the title blacklist, or if we get that in the future, with a protection option that "applies to subpages" (i.e. the non-hackish way). Cenarium (talk) 21:12, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
@Cenarium: From a technical point of view, to change main from using Template:Editnotices/Page/PAGENAME to (Template:Editnotices/Page/Main/PAGENAME or Template:Editnotices/Page/Main:PAGENAME) - can this be done on wiki, or will it require a patch? — xaosflux Talk 14:25, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Technically, it can be accomplished locally. Requires editing Template:Editnotice load. Dragons flight (talk) 05:05, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
And fwiw, the editnotice will be shown correctly when redirected to a new location. So one can make the moves then update the template to use the new location, it'll still work in the mean time.  Cenarium (talk) 01:53, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Cremation or burial?

Why can't I delete Cremation or burial?? When I choose delete it just reloads the page. I can delete other pages but not this one. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 07:28, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Not quite sure. I just did and it worked fine. Something with your browser or personal Javascript maybe? Seraphimblade Talk to me 08:11, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
That's strange I deleted another page with no problem. I'll just put it down to sunspots as they get blamed for almost everything in the Arctic. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 08:19, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm guessing it's a problem with '?' which usually indicates a query string in url's. MediaWiki encodes '?' in pagenames as %3F to avoid confusion but maybe your browser is still confused. Which browser? Does the same happen for Quo vadis? PrimeHunter (talk) 19:30, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
I was using Chrome Version 40.0.2214.115 on Ubuntu 14.04 but I just tried in Firefox 36.0 on the Quo vadis page and got the same result. This time I checked the url and noticed it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_vadis%3F?action=delete. I'll have to try later on Windows. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 23:01, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
@CambridgeBayWeather: That really is odd, since I'm using Ubuntu 14.10 with Chromium 40.0.2214.111. Are you using Twinkle or any other scripts, or just the regular Mediawiki delete button? Seraphimblade Talk to me 01:22, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
It's indeed an issue with '?' but probably not in your browser. Your link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_vadis%3F?action=delete doesn't work for me either. How do you reach that link and what is your skin? I'm in Vector and click the "More" tab and then "Delete". That gives me https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quo_vadis%3F&action=delete which works. Your url structure works on page names not containing '?', for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo?action=delete. It may be a MediaWiki bug that a query part cannot be added to a url of form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...%3F. It also fails for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_vadis%3F?action=history as non-admins can test. The "View history" tab gives me https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quo_vadis%3F&action=history which does work, but I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_vadis%3F?action=history should also have worked, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo?action=history works. MediaWiki apparently chokes on the %3F? combination where %3F is an encoded '?' ending the pagename, and '?' is the start of a query part. Or maybe there is some general url rule I'm unaware of which disallows '%3F?' in url's. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:49, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
The %3F? combination works on this wiki with an old MediaWiki version: http://mersennewiki.org/index.php/Why_participate_in_GIMPS%3F?action=history. http://mersennewiki.org/index.php/Special:Version says MediaWiki: 1.5.8. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:24, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
The problem is not restricted to '?' at the end of the pagename. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%3F_Nycticebus_linglom?action=history should have produced the page history of ? Nycticebus linglom. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:56, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
User:PrimeHunter. To get the non working link I just followed the original Quo vadis? link you provided. I then clicked on the delete and it reloaded the page with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_vadis%3F?action=delete non working link. I'm using Vector as well. I notice you said that you clicked on the "More" tab and then "Delete". On the "More" I see the only option is "Purge". The option to delete is on the "Page" tab and says "Delete page". Also the https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quo_vadis%3F&action=delete works for me as well. I looked through my deletion log and found this, I did see at least one more with the ? at the end, and this with the ? in the middle. So at one time I was able to delete pages with the ? at the end. The other links on your 01:49 post all work the same for me as they did for you. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 03:19, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
The "Page" tab is not part of MediaWiki. It is made by "Add Page and User dropdown menus to the toolbar" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. The gadget is disabled by default. I have tried to enable it and get the same non-working url as you on the Page tab. The gadget uses MediaWiki:Gadget-dropdown-menus.js which uses MediaWiki:Gadget-dropdown-menus-vector.js for Vector users, but the bug is in MediaWiki and should be fixed there. Question marks in pagenames are rare and I'm not sure it's worth coding the gadget to work around the bug by using url's with /w/index.php?title= instead of /wiki/. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:33, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
OK that was it. I removed the gadget and was able to delete https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:CambridgeBayWeather/Test3%3F&action=delete. I found that with the gadget enabled it is possible to move the page and not leave a redirect. That deleted the ? page and then of course I was able to delete the page without the ?, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:CambridgeBayWeather/Test%3F&action=edit&redlink=1. Given that there are several things I like about the gadget and the very few times that the ? comes up I'll leave it enabled and use the move workaround. Thanks for all your help. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 03:48, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Moves are made with a special page and not a query string, so the bug does not interfere. Protect and Purge on the Page tab are affected. It probably also affects several other scripts and tools. I'm not proficient with Phabricator. Can somebody see if it's there, and add it if not? PrimeHunter (talk) 04:18, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm not seeing a problem with the Protect from the page tab. It worked fine yesterday. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 04:58, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
On a pagename with a question mark? The bug is only known to affect that. PrimeHunter (talk) 05:11, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

I can fix this for MediaWiki:Gadget-dropdown-menus-vector.js, but I do not maintain the non-vector version if that is what you are using. Because of the same bug all internal links involving a page name with a ? will not work, so it's worth fixing for the interim I think. — MusikAnimal talk 06:23, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Should be fixed now. Thanks for the report! — MusikAnimal talk 07:05, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
This should be fixed in core though... -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:38, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks User:MusikAnimal that works now. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 16:18, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Search not updating

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T91216

The CirrusSearch, which normally updates within 10-15 seconds, appears to have stuck
I corrected misspellings of "received" at 12.37 and 12.38 but both sill appear in the search for recieved nearly 6 hours later - Arjayay (talk) 18:18, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I thought that it updated once a day, around 04:00 UTC, which is some eight hours off. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:59, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
The old Lucene-search updated once a day. The current CirrusSearch should normally update much faster. See mw:Help:CirrusSearch#Updates. I also get the old revision of your diff currently (you posted the same diff twice). PrimeHunter (talk) 21:01, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
This is even worse than when LuceneSearch index was not updated; at least when it got restarted, even if it took a week, it would completely reindex everything. The CirrusSearch update failure has not been seen before to this extent, I think, and something extraordinary will have to be done to make things right. I don't think they expected that something like this could actually happen, and I will be surprised if they have a way to quickly fix it. Chris the speller yack 21:23, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
We have a script for handling outages. Its one of the first things I built. NEverett (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Filed as phabricator:T91216. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:31, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
I just filed phabricator:T91217, then saw your post. It looks like you beat me by a nose. I'll update mine as being a duplicate of yours. Chris the speller yack 21:43, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Now updates to the index are taking place again as articles are edited, but the ones we already complained about are still not updated in the index, as my earlier post predicted. Chris the speller yack 02:05, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Some old edits have appeared in the updated search, and some haven't. The real one mentioned above at 12.37 hasn't, but the one I should have posted at 12.38 has, although neither article has been altered since. If there is a definite time period that has not updated, is it possible to give all articles edited in that time-frame a null edit to nudge the search along? - Arjayay (talk) 16:36, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Grabbed the task and will work on it now. Thanks for filing it! We have a script to handle it and I'll kick it off as soon as I find the timestamps to feed it.NEverett (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
I believe I've reindexed all the effected pages. I'm off to kick off this process on the other ~880 wikis! NEverett (WMF) (talk) 02:07, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
Well, I was surprised; they actually did have a way to quickly fix it. I sampled updates from yesterday to see what was reindexed, and they seem to have caught them all. This turned out better than I expected, and I have more faith in the CirrusSearch group than I did before. Thanks for resolving this. Chris the speller yack 02:56, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Question about italicizing

I came upon the article Vytautas Mažiulis and noticed that italics in the biography section are not displaying properly. The organization name "Milanese Linguistics Society" is not entirely italicized, however the country and phrase that follows it is italicized for some reason. The code looks correct. Is there something that I'm missing here? How can these italics be fixed? Mamyles (talk) 16:15, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

It's because there was an artificial linebreak after "Milanese". I've fixed it (although those organization names probably shouldn't be italicized anyway per MOS:ITAL). Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 16:21, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Looks better, thanks. That also clears up why my browser wasn't displaying a space after "Milanese" in the edit window.
I was just bothered by this issue while reading and do not care if the italics are there or not. Feel free to remove if you think they are inappropriate. Mamyles (talk) 16:33, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Fixing bulleted list inside an unbulleted list

This is basically a repost of MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Fixing bulleted list inside an unbulleted list to get some more attention.

When using {{bulleted list}} inside {{unbulleted list}}, it doesn't work because {{unbulleted list}} adds a class to the outer list without a means to revert that inheritance in inner lists. To make stuff less complicated, I propose to make the styles of unbulleted list apply strictly to the direct children of the outer list, so as to prevent the inner lists from inheriting the styles.

Example: 

{{unbulleted list
| This
| {{bulleted list|E|F}}
}}
  • This
    • E
    • F

Timothy G. from CA (talk) 03:50, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Commented there. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:46, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Orphan tags not showing up

There is something wrong with Template:Orphan, looking at the edit summary this edit: [7] hid the cleanup tag and as a result the tag has disappeared from 99 of our articles. Is there a fix fir this? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 04:53, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

@Knowledgekid87: Please see Template:Orphan#Visibility, which explains that the template is only visible for the current & previous month (e.g. not visible on A Gentleman's Kiss), but is always visible within {{multiple issues}} (e.g. visible on AUKcon). The articles are still categorized and still on your report. The template instructions also contains a fix that might interest you. Good luck! GoingBatty (talk) 05:49, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

subst not substituting

What am I messing up here? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 10:19, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Substing does not work inside <ref> or other parser tags. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:25, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! Live and learn. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 10:28, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata problem

I have added a new property to an existing item – P527 (name = 'has part', value = barangay) to (Q316370) Santa Fe, Cebu, then added qualifer P1114 (name = 'quantity', value = 10).

When I try to retrieve, using {{#invoke:Wikidata|getRawQualifierValue|P527|P1114|FETCH_WIKIDATA}} it throws an error:
Lua error in Module:Wikidata at line 168: invalid value (table) at index 1 in table for 'concat'.

Is it me or ...?

NB I have successfully used getting qualifier values before, e.g. {{Population census prose}}

--Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Sun 16:35, wikitime= 08:35, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't know Lua and know very little Wikidata so I could be wrong but it looks to me like getRawQualifierValue in Module:Wikidata cannot handle qualifiers with data type Quantity such as wikidata:Property:P1114. {{Population census prose}} uses getRawQualifierValue for wikidata:Property:P459 which has data type Item. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:58, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Well it allowed me to add the qualifier to the property, so it's a surprise it doesn't work (not really, this is wikidata we're talking). I'll take my problem over to the wikidata village pump (T) , if there is one. Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Mon 07:38, wikitime= 23:38, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
I suspect the problem is in Module:Wikidata and have posted to Module talk:Wikidata. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:42, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
I think that my naming the Wikipedia Lua module "Wikidata" may be causing confusion. Whatever happens on Wikidata won't guarantee that the Lua module (which is intended to import data from Wikidata to Wikipedia in a flexible way) will always work. The problem occurs because the module was written before numeric data types existed on Wikidata. Line 168 takes a table of all of the values for that qualifier and concatenates them together with a comma+space separator assuming that the value is a string. As I understand it, you can't concatenate numbers like that, using the table.concat() method, unfortunately. I think I can solve the problem by ensuring that the wikitext gets a string representation of the number but I'll need to do some testing before I can be sure. --RexxS (talk) 00:03, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for looking into it. Oddly, the revision time for my above edit [8] says 23:46, four minutes after the 23:42 signature which was made with a normal four ~~~~. I sometimes see a 1-minute difference which makes sense if it takes about a second to process the edit and it was saved near a minute change with signature time and revision time recorded at different stages. I have never seen more than 1 minute. The save went through quickly. My browser history indicates it was 23:46 with an accurate clock. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:08, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Well, it's not the problem I thought it was. It seems table.concat() does implicitly cast the numbers into strings, so the concatenation method works as it should. From the error message you give, I now suspect that the first item in the table is actually a table, not a single value. I'll go check that and see if I can fix it. --RexxS (talk) 00:24, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Update: yes the first item is a table, so can't be concatenated with ", " as the call tries to do. --RexxS (talk) 14:40, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

The more I've looked at this, the more I become convinced that you can't write a generic call to fetch just the value of a given qualifier associated with a given property because of the possibility of multiple values. For example, if you look at Richard Burton (d:Q151973), he has 3 spouses (P26) listed, two of whom have qualifiers for start time (P580) and end time (P582). What should a call asking for Richard Burton's spouse's start time return? Should it return nil for Elizabeth Taylor? or 3 July 1983 for Sally Burton? or 1949 for Sybil Christopher? Of course we could have it return 1949 and 3 July 1983, but what value would they be without knowing which spouse they referred to? It would be possible to write a call that fetched e.g. the value of first given qualifier from the first given property, but that becomes vulnerable to someone adding another value for the property. How would you want to deal with the situation if Santa Fe (d:Q316370) had 30 sitios and someone added "has part=sitio" with a qualifier of "quantity=30"? Should getRawQualifierValue|P527|P1114 return 10 or 30? Sorry to be negative about the problem, but I can't see a general solution. --RexxS (talk) 14:40, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't understand any of this. Other properties, for instance 'population', are quite happy to have more than one different qualifier ('date' and 'method'), no problem. Other properties, e.g. 'inception' are happy to have (and return) more than one value. I cannot believe that it is not possible to return a qualifier attached to an instantiation of a property, here 'quantity' attached to 'has part'=barangay. Time to bin it all and start again in SQL, or anything proprietary and proven.-- Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Mon 23:30, wikitime= 15:30, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Maybe a discussion is needed about what to do with multiple values (an error message and tracking category if the caller didn't specify which value was wanted?), but can it be coded to at least give the value when there is only one? PrimeHunter (talk) 16:03, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
There is no way of specifying which qualifier you want if more than one - you just get them all. But qualifier should be attached to property value, not to property name as implied here. Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Tue 00:24, wikitime= 16:24, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Yes, code can be written to return a given qualifier's value if there is only one qualifier present among all the statements connected with a given property. But how would you want it to behave in Wikipedia if somebody added another qualifier in Wikidata? Should it disappear because it's no longer a unique value? or are you willing to risk the value of the second qualifier now appearing in the Wikipedia article instead of the value of the previously unique qualifier?
Qualifiers are definitely attached to a particular name-value pair. So in the case of Richard Burton, the property named "spouse" with the value "Sybil Christopher" has attached to it a qualifier called "start date" with the value '1949'. But again how does that help you if you want a call that returns just the qualifier value? because you don't know the value "Sybil Christopher" when you make the call. On the other hand, if you want a call that returns a list of the all values of a given property along with a list of the values of a given qualifier when present, then that's possible as it could look like this for Richard Burton / property='spouse' / qualifier='start date' :
  • Elizabeth Taylor; Sally Burton, 3 July 1983; Sybil Christopher, 1949; (note that the two dates for Elizabeth Taylor's two marriages to Burton could be added at any time)
But that's different from the problem outlined by Unbuttered Parsnip. --RexxS (talk) 22:56, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
It already returns more than one value for a qualifier, as in 'inception' or 'demonym'. I don't see the point in providing a massive database which can't be interrogated. If it is possible to add a value to a qualifier of a property, then it has to be possible to read it back too. As regards particular case, I can't make any sense of the notion that a qualifier could have more than one 'quantity' value. In the general case, I think one would want the latest. So for population ordinarily you'd want the latest (current) census, not one from 10 years ago. Exceptionally you might want all of them. Because data-sort is not a parser function, it would be incumbent on WD to return a sorted list. -- Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Tue 10:52, wikitime= 02:52, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
(1) The database can be interrogated. (2) It is possible to read the data back, but if there are multiple values meeting the search criteria, you have to specify what you want read back. (3) There is no reason whatsoever why a property can't have multiple instances of the same qualifier. I already gave you the example of Richard Burton marrying his second wife twice, so the start date of the marriage would appear as a qualifier twice with two different values: 1964 and 1975. If you call for the start date of Richard Burton's marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, which qualifier value would you want returned? (3) The "latest" doesn't make sense in general for all qualifier values which could be numbers or text as well as dates. (4) Yes, sometimes you want just one qualifier value from amongst several - and there's no means of specifying which one - and sometimes you want all of them, but writing a generic module that copes with any Wikidata item won't do what you want. (5) At present there is no call to the mw.wikibase API that returns sorted tables, but sorting can be done in the Lua module, so parser functions are irrelevant. --RexxS (talk) 03:59, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
Reads like a snow job to me. I don't know how the database can be interrogated, because the only module we've been given doesn't seem to work. In particular, it doesn't allow specification of which occurrence of the property, nor of which occurrence of any qualifier. Your reply implies that the qualifiers for different instantiations of a property are jumbled together, and it's pot-luck which gets returned. Sad if true. I didn't specify every qualifier, I was restricting myself to 'quantity'. If a property has a qualifier of 'quantity' then I'd be very surprised if there could be more than one associated value. That's tantamount to saying that the value of the qualifier contains every known number. I can't imagine anyone would update a raw value by adding another instantiation of the qualifier rather than just changing the value, since there is no way of differentiation. As I said, other properties, e.g. 'inception', allow multiple copies of qualifier (a date) and return them without breaking.
Regarding Burton–Taylor, it seems incorrect to have only one wedding tuple with more than one date set, when they married twice – correct form would be one tuple for each marriage with not more than one date set each. -- Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Wed 12:49, wikitime= 04:49, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
If you want me to write more modules for specific purposes, then please feel free to ask, but please understand that these modules are created by volunteers like you and me and there's no entitlement for anyone to be "given" anything. When I wrote the Wikidata module, it only fetched property values because qualifiers were still in development. Since then, others have added calls to fetch qualifiers which - as I've pointed out - can't cover every case, although I'm pleased they work in some circumstances. To fetch a property, it is sufficient to scan though all of the values associated with that property and return them as some form of list (or a single value or nil). If you try to fetch the value(s) of a given qualifier associated with a property, then when you create a list consisting of just the qualifier values you won't know which property value they belong to, should there be multiple values for the property. Re Burton–Taylor, there's nothing "incorrect" about organising the spouse data as a single property value with multiple qualifiers - in fact that's exactly what you need if you want to populate an infobox with the names of Burton's wives. Wikidata allows editors some freedom to organise the data entered in the way that they choose, and the challenge for anyone seeking to import that data into Wikipedia is to cater for all possible cases. --RexxS (talk) 13:30, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

How long does it take for a session timeout?

I've been experiencing trouble with a bot I'm running in Javascript that signs in as a user and does a lot of stuff that takes ~3-4 hours to finish before finally editing some pages with the results. At the end I'm getting a badtoken error for the edits (which I hadn't gotten until recently, actually.. did something change?), so my only guess is that it takes so long the bot is being automatically logged out before it has time to finish. I am going to try one more time with the "keep me logged in" button selected, but just for information's sake, does anyone know the time limit for a session? Is there any way for a user to modify that setting for him/herself? Has that default value changed recently, i.e. in the last few weeks? Thanks!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 01:19, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Ok I ran the code again and got the same error, even with the "keep me logged in" button selected, so now I'm stumped. Just to check to make sure I wasn't being logged out after the run, I visited another page after the error and sure enough was still logged in, so that doesn't seem to be the problem.
The code is set up so that it can be run by two accounts--the bot one (User:NationalRegisterBot) and this one, my personal one (for situations like this, mostly). While signed into my personal account, I just tried to run a smaller section of the code that only takes about 10 minutes to run instead of 3-4 hours but which relies on the same routine (literally the exact same JavaScript function) to edit pages, and it worked, successfully editing the page it was supposed to. This led me to believe that maybe there was just something wrong with fetching a token for the bot account, so I tried running the same function that worked on my personal account while signed in with my bot account, expecting it to fail, but much to my surprise, it worked!
Again, the piece of code that worked and the original 3-4 hour piece of code both rely on the same routine to edit pages at the end... the only difference between the two as far as practice goes is the time it takes for the two functions to run. It seems that since the 3-4 hour code takes so long to run, something freaks out with the edit token, causing it to be invalid. To figure out if that was the case--maybe the edit token had expired or something--I made the code fetch the edit token at the beginning of the run and then again at the end of the run so I could compare the two and got the same output for both (42163ed75d03ff490b30c96e9d59716a54f5440f+\, if that's relevant). Because they were the same, it doesn't appear to me that the token expires over the course of execution, so I'm really stumped. How can a function work in one instance and not in another?
All of this started about 2-3 weeks ago, so I suspect something has changed in the API or somewhere else, but I haven't been able to find any information about that. Does anyone know why I might be encountering the error I'm describing?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 08:59, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
The test fetching the edit token at the beginning and end of the run should certainly have not given you the same token each time; even fetching two tokens one second apart should give you two different tokens (but both valid) since the end of October. Since you got the same token hours apart, whatever you're using to fetch the tokens is apparently caching them rather than fetching a new one the second time.
Ideally, your bot should be able to attempt the edit, and if it gets a badtoken error it should automatically fetch a fresh token and retry the edit.
As for the time it takes, the configuration is currently using the default of 1 hour for $wgObjectCacheSessionExpiry. I don't see any recent changes to the timeout, but I do see there was this recent change to session handling that probably made page views no longer reset the session timer. Anomie⚔ 13:05, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

If I were you, i'd rewrite the bot to make use of mediawiki.api.edit module and friends, which do automatic token (re)fetching, uses promises etc and detects api errors. Examples of its usage can be found here. And make sure to add proper logging in the fails of the request, so that you KNOW what is failing instead of having to guess. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:54, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

I see you are using mw.user.tokens and not checking for bad-token failures. That is probably why it is failing. These tokens are valid 'pre generated' tokens, but your script is supposed to be able to fetch a fresh token if your request fails with bad-token for whatever reason. mw.Api knows about these constraints and applies or recovers from them as required. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:06, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks everyone for the responses. Modifying the code to use mw.Api makes everything work. I was not aware that mw.user.tokens generates a token at pageload, not at the time of execution. In fact, I misunderstood the idea of a token all together. Either way, I have everything working now, so mission accomplished! Thanks again!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 09:25, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
@Dudemanfellabra: you will want to wrap any usage of mw.Api with mw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.api.edit' ).done( function() { usage here } ), to guarantee that the edit module is loaded on demand if nothing else on the page has loaded the module yet. Developing user scripts with resource loader modules—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:26, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Does Wikipedia collect statistics on the up-times and response-times of its servers?

At times, I have been unable get a page from Wikipedia, and it appears that the servers are either down or temporarily overloaded. When this happens, I do not know if the problem is with my computer, the network, or Wikipedia. I usually diagnose the problem by trying other web sites, but the really does not tell me if anything was wrong with Wikipedia.

My email provider gives me a link to pingdom, where I can easily tell if the email servers were down. Does Wikipedia keep track of down-times, response times, or server loads? Where should I look?

If I had a graph of Wikipedia response-times, I could plan on using Wikipedia when it was lightly loaded.

Thanks.

Comfr (talk) 04:32, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Lots of data is available at http://gdash.wikimedia.org/ - there is no one graph of some "response-times" though... --Malyacko (talk) 08:32, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
There is some information on status.wikimedia.org, eg. the response times for HTTPS wikipedia. --Sitic (talk) 22:13, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Linking from medal icons

Hello.

I was trying to make the medal templates to link to an optional target by adding link={{{link}}} in {{gold1}}, so the link can be passed on to the {{sort}} template. It works fine, but when you don't provide a link to {{gold1}}, it links to the gold medal icon itself, instead of not linking to anything at all. What is it that I do wrong?

For an example, check the Brittany Bowe article, section "Results overview", where I've linked the gold medal icon in the last row, left-most column, to an article, and it works, but the other gold medal icons in the same row link to the icon itself. I don't want that, and why does this occurs when the link parameter supplied is empty?

HandsomeFella (talk) 14:42, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

This is result, that you wanted? See my edit. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:26, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
Yes, it is. But the parameter is empty by default, so why does one have to add that code to avoid linking to the medal icon? HandsomeFella (talk) 15:50, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
I see now that I had missed that pipe character. Thanks. HandsomeFella (talk) 17:21, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Popups not working

...starting late last week on several different Mac running various fairly-new and fairly-old firefox versions. I've tried disabling the gadget (hovering on a wikilink gives me a yellow box with just the target name) then re-enabling it gadget (reverts back to nothing appearing while hovering on a wikilink) and cache purge/refresh. Same on commons as well as enwp. On a Mac where firefox has not accessed WP in a long time if at all, popups do work. So it seems like "something at some level" has changed to be incompatible with "something else", but I don't know how to diagnose further what/where. DMacks (talk) 04:08, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

It works for me with Firefox in Windows Vista. Does it work if you log out and click https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Example&withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js&withCSS=MediaWiki:Gadget-navpop.css? That also works for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:25, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Popups works for me on OSX 10.9.5, Firefox 35. Keegan (talk) 05:42, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Updated to FF 35.0.1edit: and 36.0 to be sure, and popups are still fine. Keegan (talk) 05:44, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Removed AdBlock (it hadn't been a problem before, but may as well rule it out), also tried manually importing it in my common.js, still nothing. DMacks (talk) 10:22, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
It's working for me, although I had a weird problem with a popup appearing (after accidentally hovering over an article title) and then refusing to go away a few days ago. What OS are you running? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Input

When did we get Smurf buttons for <inputbox>? See Wikipedia:Editnotice#Creating editnotices. --  Gadget850 talk 21:43, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi. This is the "mw-ui-button" CSS class. It was added to InputBox here: <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rEINB7ce80c51a5f0c6ee8e78758afb924bc18b00d525>. You'll see some additional mw-ui-related changes at <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/EINB/>. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:06, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
@MZMcBride: But, what are the CSS specifics of class="mw-ui-button"? The reason I ask is that that class does not yet exist over at Wikia. Therefore, I need to add the class details locally to MediaWiki:Common.css. Unfortunately, I could not discern the simple CSS setup from those phabricator pages. Thanks! — SpikeToronto 18:57, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi SpikeToronto. Newer versions of MediaWiki use Less for Cascading Style Sheets. The relevant code for ".mw-ui-button" is here: <https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/0c8327466bebd44a9c0f60cd010307446b9ead63/resources/src/mediawiki.ui/components/buttons.less> (found via this search). --MZMcBride (talk) 05:22, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
@MZMcBride: Thanks!! — SpikeToronto 20:29, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Table-end templates

We have a vast number of templates for ending tables, whose content is |}.

I propose that we redirect them to {{End}}, which has the same content, and replace instances with {{End|Foo}}, where "Foo" is the name of the template which starts the table, as in this edit.

Eventually, a bot could do substitution for us. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:10, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

  • support --  Gadget850 talk 20:06, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
  • (ec) Redirecting is fine, but replacing the templates with {end|...} isn't very usefull; it does somewhat confuse the otherwise obvious pairing of templates. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 20:08, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The templates are from pairs like {{Public art header}} and {{Public art footer}}. The current system gives us the ability to easily change implementation of the pair, for example if something is added to the bottom or it's no longer a table. Your suggestion {{End|Public art table}} could in theory change implementation by testing the parameter value in {{End}} and do something different for Public art table, but it requires that users always remember the parameter and always give it the exact same value. The parameter is ignored by {{End}} so users will see no difference if they omit or misstype it. And {{End}} is fully protected for good reasons but it means most editors would need help to change implementation of low-use cases like the currently unprotected {{Public art footer}}. We would also lose the ability to use Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Public art footer, for example to compare it with Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Public art header. Pairs like {{Public art header}} and {{Public art footer}} are also easier to spot in wikitext, especially when they start the line. I see no significant advantages of the proposed system. It would make it easier to fix if wikitext suddenly stopped accepting |} as code for table end but that seems highly unlikely. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:26, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
    • You appear to be considering improbable hypothetical scenarios, such as "[if] it's no longer a table" and "testing the parameter value in {{End}}". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:52, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
      • Eh yeah of course those are hypothetical. Wasn't he just saying that that was the whole point ? To keep that option open ? Such changes have happened in the past. Switches between divs and table structures have been quite common, and I don't think we have seen the last of them yet. I advise against substitution. Redirects could be possible, but might lead to people using the target instead. Indirect transclusion seem appropriate, but will wast more resources. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:27, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
      • The proposal looks like a solution looking for a problem. If there is no problem to solve then there is no reason to destroy the current flexibility and create potential problems. Who knows whether {{Col-end}} will always have a table end? If we replace uses by {{end}} then maybe it will, because we have made it very hard to change it. It currently says <p></p>|} (newlines omitted in code display here), so I guess the current version would actually be excluded from the proposal. Lots of end templates are not an isolated table end or may not be so in the future. {{Multicol-end}} is </div>|}</div>. {{Football squad end}} is |}|}. {{Extended football squad end}} had been |} since 2010 but added code to give or request a source last week. And consider {{S-end}} where the documentation says (I don't know whether it actually works like that currently): "The various succession box templates are considered navigational content and thus are excluded from print in the PDFs and printed books. However, {{end}} can be used to end any table, thus that template cannot be excluded from print. However, {{s-end}} can be excluded without any negative repercussions. Similar templates that are unambiguously the end of tables which should be excluded in print should redirect here, rather than to {{end}}." If we redirect the templates then it's certain and not just a hypothetical that some users will use the targets instead. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:02, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
      • I didn't say they are "hypothetical", I said they are "improbable hypothetical scenarios". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:11, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
  • I agree with redirecting end templates to {{end}}, but we shouldn't replace the instances for the reasons that PrimeHunter spells out. If someone does ever need to change one of the end templates, then that would be the difference between a one-edit task and a task requiring bot work. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 00:52, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose per PrimeHunter. This is too rigidly tied to the current implementation of these templates and would make it much more difficult to change them individually to a different implementation if we someday wished to do so. And what is broken about the current system that this would fix? —David Eppstein (talk) 00:03, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

CAPTCHA not working properly

The problem that I reported here to no avail just happened again. This seems obviously broken and in need of a fix. Could some kind person log it as a bug? 109.151.63.210 (talk) 21:50, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Please see mw:How to report a bug (exact steps, browser and OS info etc. are welcome). --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 08:11, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

contrib logs

When I go to the contributions of an editor, and click his logs I get 'all public logs'. When I go to the contributions as an admin, I am however often not interested in all their public logs, but in all logs, or even in all non-public logs. However, currently I have to go through every single non-public log to see whether the editor was logged in one of them and for what reason. Could the system be changed to standard show 'all logs that I am allowed to see with my userrights' (which for ordinary users defaults to 'all public logs' as well), and have two options 'all public logs' (to get an overview of all regular information like account creation, moving stuff around and such), and 'all non-public logs' (which shows why a user ran into problems, or why a user is problematic) as second and third in that dropdown menu. --Dirk Beetstra T C 03:38, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Possible bug in the access date validator?

In the article Circular prime, the References section displays as follows for me (bolding is mine):

  1. The Universal Book of Mathematics, Darling, David J., retrieved $1 $2 Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  2. Prime Numbers - The Most Mysterious Figures in Math, Wells, D., retrieved $1 $2 Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  3. Circular Primes, Patrick De Geest, retrieved 25 July 2010
  4. The mathematics of Oz: mental gymnastics from beyond the edge, Pickover, Clifford A., retrieved $1 $2 Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)

It looks like something got messed up with the way the access dates are validated, since $1 $2 is being shown instead of the specified access date. Could someone familiar with that bit of the code take a look? Thanks, 28bytes (talk) 15:08, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

The Universal Book of Mathematics, Darling, David J., retrieved 25 July 2010 (see page 70) {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help) is using |accessdate=25 July 2010 (see page 70) which is a bad date. But this should not be exposing the variables. Reported at Module talk:Citation/CS1/Archive 11#Date checking. --  Gadget850 talk 15:13, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-10

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

Recent software changes

  • A Lua function to use Wikidata has changed. You need to update the pages that use it. [9]
  • You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Uzbek and Minangkabau. You need to enable it in your Beta options.
  • You can now hide banners if you don't have an account. [10] [11]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 4 (calendar).
  • You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Punjabi and Kyrgyz. You can ask for the tool in other languages.
  • Editing the fake blank line in VisualEditor is now simpler. This change also fixed a few bugs. [12] [13] [14] [15]
  • The TemplateData editor now warns you if a related page already has TemplateData. [16]
  • The TemplateData table now tells you if a template doesn't take any parameters. [17]

Meetings

  • You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 4 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join technical meetings in France and Mexico this year. You will be able to ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [18]

Future changes

  • You will be able to get a direct link for a section of a page. [19]

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

16:42, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Documented direct section links at Help:Section#Direct section links. --  Gadget850 talk 15:41, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Have categories been messed with?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T55130

As of today, categories appear to be trying to avoid splitting articles sorted under the same letter. For any large category this results in a single column of 200 entries, which looks ridiculous. Is this a site-wide change or a problem on my end? —Xezbeth (talk) 08:23, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm seeing three columns, even if there's no heading to split at. (Maybe browser-related?) If there's a split after the first article in the cat, but no others in the first 200 (for example at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Living_people&from=9th%20W), I see a column of 1 and two columns of about 100 each, which is still fairly ridiculous, though. —Cryptic 08:34, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
I only get the single column with Chrome, IE doesn't have that problem. Even so, having different sized columns everywhere looks silly compared to the uniform categories we've had until now. —Xezbeth (talk) 08:47, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
Categories switched from tables to CSS columns. There are some minor errors in its implementation though, so I added my comments in phab:T55130. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:26, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
I'm seeing two columns in Chrome: the first column contains only 5 or 6 entries and all the rest are crammed into the second column, there is just whitespace where the third column should be. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:09, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Invisible templates

The templates {{oldpuffull}} and {{oldffdfull}} are only shown on en.wikipedia.org but not on en.m.wikipedia.org. This causes confusion to the users of the mobile website. What is causing this and how can this be fixed? --Stefan2 (talk) 19:51, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

What's causing this is the presence of the tmbox class. Mobile site has the CSS declaration display: none !important; applied to a number of classes, including tmbox. It's exactly the same issue as the navbox and metadata classes that occasionally come up on this page. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:04, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
Yeah I have been bashing the mobile team a bit on this topic. So far all this hiding hasn't been too bad (hardly any Wikipedians were using the mobile site anyways), but they really need to start investing some time on how to reduce those hidden content blocks and present the same information, in better ways. Like, a navbox is totally pointless on my phone, but there are ways you can use the contents of navboxes, to serve a similar need on mobile.. (carousel of related articles for instance). Similarly, I might not want to see a full section ambox on my smaller phone, but i might want to see a right floating small warning button or something that allows me to show the information. I don't know, just throwing ideas up there. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:22, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

File mover needed

Re File:Gerald Farinas saimin at Shiro's Saimin Haven in Hawaii.JPG, I made a few tries with copying this over to Commons with the Move to Commons Assistant. It does not come up with the full file image name: Step One. I've copied other images to Commons with assistant and had no problems. I'm thinking this file name is too long for the assistant to recognize/handle. Continuing the process with the shortened name brings up a message that no such file exists. If I am correct, would someone with file mover permission please move it to a more apt name? — Maile (talk) 20:42, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

PDF generator

The Wiki' PDF generator is still funky. In the past several days, every time I attempt to generate and download a pdf file of an article I get a 'Wiki' Foundation' error. Will someone look into that or forward this message to someone who knows how to do something about it? Thnx. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 23:00, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

@Gwillhickers: Does this happen for you only with large books, or also with single-article PDFs? We're aware of issues with large books due to HHVM and investigating, see phab:T89918.--Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 05:39, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
@Erik Moeller (WMF): I was getting a Wiki' Foundation error even when I attempt to download one article. Just now however I was able to download a PDF on Abraham Lincoln, but got an Wiki' error when I attempted to do so with the Ulysses S. Grant article. Just to complicate matters. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 21:46, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
@Gwillhickers: OK, thanks for the update. This is likely the same issue -- timeout due to very large file. We'll aim to get this resolved ASAP, sorry for the inconvenience.--Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 06:30, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Non-issue

Unrelated to my other thing here. "No, we will not add a spell-checker, or spell-checking bot. You can use a web browser such as Firefox, which has a spell checker." above Not that I care but why? –DangerousJXD (talk) 10:39, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

See WP:FDB#Fully automatic spell-checking bots. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:16, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
@DangerousJXD: You can also use tools such as AutoWikiBrowser, WPCleaner, and wikEd to find and fix spelling errors. See Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos for the list of typo rules and other information. GoingBatty (talk) 13:33, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Twinkle not working on a redirected talk page

At User talk:RightBKC I'm trying to leave a copyvio warning, but get the message "User talk page modification: Could not resolve redirects for: User_talk:RightBKC". I also can't find any history for the page, although it's possible there isn't any. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 12:21, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

That's very strange. I understand why Twinkle can't resolve it (the page redirects to itself) but I don't understand why the logs show the page as having been deleted but no edits to it (you can't delete something that was never created, right?) Since you're an oversighter I'm assuming there aren't any edits that were oversighted, correct? If there were, that might explain the missing history; if not there may be something screwy going on with the global rename function. 28bytes (talk) 12:47, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I can't see anything, so maybe there isn't any history. At least two editors reverted copyvio by this user but don't see to have warned him. Dougweller (talk) 13:25, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Database error, I've been pointed to [20]. Dougweller (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 14:58, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Outdated link on "page information" page

Is the "page information" page (e.g. [21]) editable by local admins (perhaps via a Mediawiki: page)? I notice there is an outdated link to the toolserver in the footer. 28bytes (talk) 13:02, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Do you mean this list? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:15, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Yes, that's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! 28bytes (talk) 13:47, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Which is funny, because apparently I've actually edited that page before. Must be getting old... 28bytes (talk) 13:48, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
?uselang=qqx or &uselang=qqx shows the name of used MediaWiki messages: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&action=info&uselang=qqx. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:12, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Very handy, thanks! 28bytes (talk) 23:53, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Background color of header cells in tables.

Since a while ago (I don't know exactly when) tables header cells (=cells which are coded with ! instead of|) don't have a background color anymore on the mobile version of the site. Why is that? Furthermore, even in the desktop version their background color has become much lighter and is actually hardly noticeable at all, especially if a background color is coded for the whole table. There is hardly any contrast at all. Why? Many other wikipedias have much darker ( and in my opinion better) background color for their header cells (e.g. German, Dutch, ...). If it's important I generally use desktop Safari 8.0.3. Tvx1 02:15, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

The desktop CSS for the wikitable class is defined in mediawiki.legacy/shared.css. There was a recent change to padding, but not color. Would you give an example?
I don't know where the mobile CSS repository is located. (anyone?) But I can see that the table background is set to transparent. As to why, my SWAG is that someone thought it was a good idea. --  Gadget850 talk 12:37, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
Mobile Frontend extension. All styling files. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 14:12, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
There has been no change in table color here, but I note that the Dutch Wikipedia has set a darker color for header cells. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 14:12, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
Ok. If the color wasn't changed in the desktop I might have been wrong. I thought the contrast had reduced but I might be mistaken. I do think our header color is rather light however. Tvx1 22:43, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Reflist and Wikisource templates

When I look at the Writer article using Firefox 36.0.1, the references are displayed on top of the numerous {{Wikisource}} templates. When I look at the same article using Internet Explorer 11, the references start after the {{Wikisource}} templates. What is the correct way this article should be displayed? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 15:57, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Moving File:Tomas Transtromer and Modhir Ahmed.jpg up a bit will fix this. So will removal of irrelevant Wikisource templates.--  Gadget850 talk 17:09, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
@Gadget850: It appears that the picture of the Nobel Prize winning poet is supposed to be in the Awards category. Presuming that the image and Wikisource templates are important enough to be there (which they might not be), what would be the next step? GoingBatty (talk) 21:34, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
The image is taller than the section, which causes the problem. Clear it with {{-}} (which will add a lot of whitespace), reduce the height or movie it. --  Gadget850 talk 22:08, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
The box-style {{Wikisource}} templates can be changed to {{Wikisource-inline}} if the boxes interfere with content further down the page - Evad37 [talk] 23:26, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
The templates are in the wrong section, for a start - Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout#Links to sister projects says to put them in the last section, which for Writer is "External links" - but they're in "References". The {{commons}} and {{commons category}} templates advise "do not place this template in a section containing columns"; but {{Wikisource}} does not. Perhaps it should. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:27, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
@Evad37 and Redrose64: I combined your advice and replaced the {{Wikisource}} templates with a {{Wikisource-inline}} template in the External links section. Others can decide if these templates are really worthwhile or not. Thanks everyone! GoingBatty (talk) 01:35, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
I thought there was an inline version, but it wasn't linked from {{Wikisource}}. --  Gadget850 talk 01:39, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Knowledge of personal pronoun preference data base

There is an interest in tracking progress toward gender equality by dynamically updating statistical measure of self-identified "gender pronoun usage preference" on user pages to confirm trend of progress to achieve gender parity. This is likely admin only access to technical user data. Does anyone know how easy/how difficult it would be to gather and then print out these statistics? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 21:16, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

@LawrencePrincipe: Actually, you can access it using the "gender" magic word like so: {{gender:username|he|she|unset}}
So if you enter {{gender:Philosopher|he|she|unset}}, you get he, indicating hat I have my preferences set to "he". I do the same thing to you and see that yours is "unset". – Philosopher Let us reason together. 00:14, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
@Philosopher: On a one-by-one basis that works, though the stats are needed system wide on a weekly and/or monthly basis. That is, out of the total number of new users per month, what ratio self-identified as female and what ratio self-identified as male system-wide. Can it be done system-wide for being dynamically updated? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 00:35, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Listed at Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences but out of date. --  Gadget850 talk 00:53, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
@Gadget850: Those stats are quite fine, but quite dated: "User preferences statistics; data as of 23:12, 19 June 2014 (UTC)." Is there a way to update them, or get a month-by-month graph? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 02:01, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Looks like this was run on the old Toolserver. I don't know of a replacement. --  Gadget850 talk 02:23, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Note that this data is very unlikely to be useful or meaningful. The preference is designed to be used for gendering language correctly (not an issue in English) and not for demographic tracking; most users will never set it. Andrew Gray (talk) 15:28, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
@Andrew Gray: The gender stats from the UN study from 2010 are the only ones currently is use and are dated. Although not optimal, looking at the "user preference choice of gender" offers a useful approximation. It is not optimal, but useful for gaining some insight into the current status of the gender stats. Are you familiar with the new Toolserver applications and data base access? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 16:02, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
FWIW, this is the WMF Analytics discussion from last year on whether it was likely to be useful data. Andrew Gray (talk) 19:51, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Hi Andrew Gray; That conversation between Ryan Kaldari, Aaron, and Steven Walling at WMF Analytics was interesting on gender preference data being used in a sub-optimal way of getting gender stats updated from the old 2010 UN data. If anyone has their user id name, then I could ping them to try to find someone who knows the new Toolserver. The link just provided above here by Gadget850 was strongly on target with women editors estimated at 19%, which is actually quite close to the 2010 UN numbers. If anyone knows the new Toolserver well enough, or has the user id for any of the above (Ryan, Aaron, and Steve Walling) then I could ping them. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 20:46, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean by "knows the new toolserver", but if you have an idea of what the old SQL query was you can try it at quarry - no need for a toolserver/labs account. I would strongly stress that the 19% is probably as much random chance as meaningful data, though. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:56, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Does someone know how to update this link: Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 21:22, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
@LawrencePrincipe: The code that generates this report is at Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences/Configuration. Looks like it comes from the Toolserver era, so it's going to need adjustments, but you should be able to run the SQL queries at least without modifications on Quarry (mentioned above). Perhaps you can get MZMcBride (its author) to make it work. Matma Rex talk 12:46, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
@Matma Rex: MZMcB wrote that for the old toolserver, and what is needed to maintain stats now is if it can be updated/converted to the new toolserver to update the stats. Any way that this can be done? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 01:53, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

(un-indent) phabricator:T60196 is what's blocking us here. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:03, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

@MZMcBride:@Rich Farmbrough: That issue seems to have been addressed by @Rich who appears to be able to find a way to get the gender stats on a monthly basis (see section immediately below). The last update to comments on the phabricator link you just provide was from 14Dec which has not been updated since then. Any chance of getting the month-by-month gender preference stats for the last three or four monthly intervals? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 00:09, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Section break for Wikimedia research stats

There was a user survey done by the WMF, the results of which have not been released yet. There is a paper which describes identifying users gender by name as a supplementary process (I forget which paper). There is also some work on gendered linguistic differences on Wikipedia, and the conclusion I took from that was that it is not valid to extrapolate gender tells from general Internet discourse to Wikipedia discourse without supporting evidence. I also analysed some small samples of text on a standard "gender tester" with poor results. However there is no reason that a full text analysis of all talk page contributions could not be done, and it might well lead to a model with good gender predictive power, since there is a valid training set consisting of the gender identified users. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:46, 18 February 2015 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: That paper you mention would be interesting to locate if you have any leads. The issue of using the new toolserver to count up the number of new accounts which self-identify as female seems to be difficult to accommodate, even though the old toolserver apps did this with ease. The research apps you describe above sound pretty advanced, though the simple counting of new accounts which self-identify as female would offer a first step if someone could figure out the new toolserver. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 15:18, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
The last 5000 new accounts (that have edited) were 9 male, 1 female, 4990 unset. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:13, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
Thanks, Rich, that is important to keep in mind (also, specifying user gender is only possible since october 2011):
"However there is no reason that a full text analysis of all talk page contributions could not be done, and it might well lead to a model with good gender predictive power, since there is a valid training set consisting of the gender identified users." - Except that this would be freaking creepy! --Atlasowa (talk) 16:37, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Declared: male = 502573, female=98369 , female = 16.40% of those with declared gender.
Admins: female=56, male= 600.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:04, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
@Rich Farmbrough:@Atlasowa: Those are remarkable gender stats, but what does 500,000 male editors refer to? The Economist newsweekly has stated here [[1]] that there is a total of 50,000 editors in 2007, which went down to 30,000 editors in 2014. What does your 502,573 number mean, and is it related to the 2011 date cited by @Atlasowa? Maybe there is a simple explanation. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 17:50, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ "The future of Wikipedia: WikiPeaks?". The Economist. March 1, 2014. Retrieved March 11, 2014.
The vast majority of the 20,555,036 Wikipedia accounts have never edited (or have no edits visible in their contributions). There are several obvious reasons for these accounts, and some not so obvious:
  1. Someone sees some vandalism and creates an account, but it is fixed by the time they get there.
  2. Someone creates an account but finds editing too hard, changes their mind, gets distracted (ooh look a butterfly!)
  3. Accounts created to protect a name (e.g, User:Placeholder, and WP:DOPPELGÄNGER accounts) or to reserve a name
  4. Accounts who try to vandalise and give up because the edit filters won't let them
  5. Accounts that created an article which was later speedy deleted
  6. Accounts where the password was forgotten, or set wrongly
  7. Sleeper socks
and probably a few more.
And the other figures are based on "active editors" which has various definitions, usually in terms of X edits per month or year.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:49, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
LawrencePrincipe, the Economist refers not really to "total editors" but to "active editors" (Active Editors = Registered (and signed in) users who made 5 or more edits in a month), see english WP summary stats, 2007: ~50,000 active editors and 2014: ~30,000 active editors. Same trend on other big WP, german WP summary stats 2007: ~9,000 active editors and 2014: ~6,000 active editors. Total (ever) Registered users on enWP: 24,107,661, that makes 500,000 male editors a very small part. Same for admins: Out of 1,363 enWP Administrators, 56 are female and 600 male. --Atlasowa (talk) 19:28, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
@Rich Farmbrough: The comments all appear to be in agreement. The stats would be interesting to see for results for the last 10,000 editors and the last 15,000 editors. Are they all consistent at about 10% gender pronoun usage? @Atlasowa: The Economist article also states that non-English Wikipedia is stable at about 42,000 active editors, up or down 2000 for seasonal variation. The 'active' editor number appears to be a significant one for all the reasons that Rich has stated above. Can the stats and tools you provided be used as reliable data to be published from Wikimedia? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 21:41, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
The Quarry tools are there, and I might be able to make something better. (Well I am able, but I need to brush up my SQL.)
The 5k figure I can potentially get you the 10k and 15k figure. To replicate those figures, it is important to state the time by which the accounts needed to have edited to qualify. Probably simpler just to list the 15k accounts.
I do agree with Steve Walling, though, that the declared numbers are a poor proxy. For example GamerGate may have made females lees willing to self-identify (or it may not.. but it's a potential confounding factor.)
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:36, 18 February 2015 (UTC).
@Rich Farmbrough: All those stats would be useful since at present there is no new data on gender stats since the 2010 UN study. If you say "it is important to state the time" for the 5k, 10k, 15k then it may be just as easy to double the time interval to indicate how many women registered (approx. 10k level), and the triple the time interval to approx. the 15k level, if that seems reasonable. The actual number for each time interval would tell the story. Regarding your other question about women "GamerGate" concerns, my understanding is that if women were given confidence that self-identifying gender would help them to better achieve gender parity, then they would have every incentive to do so. Historically, a chance to achieve goals is often a high incentive to participate. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 00:31, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
Absolutely, it's the case that Editathons based on improving coverage (achieving gender parity) on women's history, women's literature etc. are very successful in attracting participants (of both genders) I believe for this reason. However the motivation to edit is generally not related to gender parity, and those who are really passionate about this tend to think (perhaps rightly) that their time is best spent encouraging other women and girls to edit.
As far as the numbers go 5,000 editors is about 2 or 3 days worth. But I can take samples at monthly intervals, or some such. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 00:52, 19 February 2015 (UTC).
If the monthly stats are a convenient time interval then by all means it would be useful to see it, for a few monthly intervals if possible. It is not clear to me why this data is being called unreliable by different editors. This is the same data source for counting the number of new editors and number of edits per week, per month, etc, with no-one thinking these data counts as being unreliable? Why call them unreliable for counting personal pronoun preference selection on user pages? LawrencePrincipe (talk) 20:37, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
It's unreliable because it's not complete. Making your gender public is optional: those I have met in real life know my gender, but I can (and do) hide it from those who only know me electronically: {{he or she|Redrose64}} → he or she. I expect that there are many editors who have not set their gender simply because they don't know that it is possible for them to do so - and some may have set it without realising that it's not compulsory. By contrast, the number of edits that I make is permanently recorded, and moreover is something that I cannot hide. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:23, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I have produced a little graph at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force#F.2FM_ratio_of_gender_identifying_editors_on_en:WP which shows the gender ratio of new gender identifying editors month by month. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:16, 4 March 2015 (UTC).

redrose and Richf; those graphs are very good with comments on talk there. It is a priority to ask redrose how hard it would be to make a gender prefered sign in tab as a system wide change. If jwhales is serious for more gender equality then these stats are essential to track progress. The larger the base of stats then the more reliable the data. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 20:16, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
@LawrencePrincipe: I don't see why it should be a priority to ask me - I am not a MediaWiki developer. Try phab: (but don't hold your breath, judging by a recent experience of mine, they will probably close it as "invalid" because one of them passed it to the wrong department). --Redrose64 (talk) 20:56, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
Giving a gendered create account tab at the top of the page sounded like it might be welcoming. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 20:17, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
I guess Lawrence can have any priority he likes! And indeed you gave him one answer he needs, which is Phabricator.
For reference the figures I used are at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rich_Farmbrough/Gender_balance.
I have thought about the Gender Prefs and ISTM that adding it to account creation would not be too onerous, especially if a "prefer not to say" or "hide" option, or both were provided.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:22, 7 March 2015 (UTC).
Yes, agree completely. Right next to the "Login" tab we could leave the current "Create account" tab as is, and then place a color coded one next to it for an optional gendered "Create account for women" (pink scarlet color tab I assume). Phabricator (see comment of @Redrose64: above) apparently wants an RfC for this first somewhere though I have never set one up for them. If someone can do it, then the tool of @Rich Farmbrough: just described above would have a much richer supply of data to show gender equality trends and trending on Wikipedia. Such a "Create account for women" tab would also be able to give a simple news flash of current Edit-a-thons for women editors as one possible use among others. Cheers. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 19:54, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
A special "Create account for women" pink tab is about as useful as this pink minibus. No. Just no. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:30, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Data collection for user pronoun preference stats

There is much skepticism on the gender gap issue at Wikipedia and some argue that gender distribution in the IT industry in general, currently at about 28 percent, cannot be breeched. Is there a preferred position that you have taken on this issue (see Redrose above), that is, gender equality is possible or gender equality is not possible at Wikipedia. Rich's tools above depend on getting added supplies of gender data, if Wikipedia wishes to track these stats in a serious way, then what would you suggest. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 01:13, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

About the "sign-in tab" idea, which I take to be an extra box on the account sign up page to specify gender: The GettingStarted team (now disbanded) did some work on things like that. Their overall finding is that every extra question you add to the sign-up process means that measurably fewer people sign up. "Pick a username, password, (optional) email address, and (optional) gender" will result in fewer accounts being created than the current "Pick a username, password, and (optional) email address". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:17, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi @WhatamIdoing: That seems very reasonable to leave the sign-up sheet as it is. The big question is the account sign-up tab on the system wide screen right before you get to the sign-up sheet. This new gender tab does not even have to be a long term thing, and 90 days would be sufficient time to collect much needed data for Rich's new gender stats tools discussed above. Since the tab on the system wide screen would be color coded and right next to the regular "Create account" tab, then there would be no need to re-ask the gender question after it is selected as "Create account for women". That makes it one less question on the sign-up form, and the data can still be gathered for the trial period of data collection of these statistics. Cheers. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 19:00, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Tables just changed (using monobook)

I use monobook, and the default cell height and padding seem to have changed. The font size of the text appears to be the same, but the cells are definitely bigger. Where could a change have been made that would affect this for me? -Niceguyedc Go Huskies! 01:59, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

It's the same for me on Vector. Also, the bullets on bulleted lists are smaller (like a middot) and appearing to be at the bottom of the line instead of the usual larger size centered vertically on the line. Imzadi 1979 → 02:25, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
OS and browser please? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:21, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
The bullets are now SVG instead of PNG. There is one known issue where Webkit on iOS does not size the bullets correctly. Webkit bug report. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 10:28, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm using Safari version 8.0.3 on MacOS X Yosemite (10.10.2). Firefox (v. 14.0.1) does not have the bullet size issue, however the bullets are still slightly off center vertically, putting them slightly too low, but not as low as in Safari where the are at the bottom of the line. In Chrome (v. 40.0.2214.115), the appearance is the same as Firefox: right size but slightly too low on the line. Just for kicks, I also looked in Opera (v. 12.12 ), and it's the same as Chrome and Firefox. The bullets look the same in Safari on an iPad running iOS 8.1.3 as they do on Safari running on the desktop. Imzadi 1979 → 15:46, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

@Edokter: I'm using Windows 7 and Firefox 36. I don't actually notice anything different with the bullets, just the extra size of rows in tables. -Niceguyedc Go Huskies! 14:06, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

@Imzadi1979 and Niceguyedc: The table cells for .wikitable have had their padding increased... doubled even. I found only this commit, but cannot find a accompanying task that discusses this change. (The bullets only affects Vector.) -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 14:43, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Yep, the previous padding was pretty tight. You can see examples at testwiki:Wikitable padding. This change shouldn't have broken anything. Please provide links here or file Phabricator tasks if you see issues. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:50, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
While we are on this, where is the repository for shared.css? The catalog still links to SVN, and I can't find main on git. --  Gadget850 talk 16:02, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
[22] this? It's on mediawiki core repo. Glaisher (talk) 16:09, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! Since I keep referring to it, created {{shared.css}}. --  Gadget850 talk 16:20, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Is this a permanent change? I'm working with tables all the time on wikipedia and am quite upset by this change. Bigger tables don't even fot on a page anymore. Personally I think the tables harder to read and it looks untidy. Isn't there any way too make the table cells the size you want? Jahn1234567890 (talk) 00:45, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
@Edokter and MZMcBride: I also agree that the change should be reverted - Jahn1234567890's note on its untidy look is well take. It is also harder to follow visually, especially when zoomed in - as I have to because of vision difficulties - as the distance between the text and the lines is increased. Finally, vertical vs. horizontal whitespace is now unbalanced, as dmeonstrated in the small table at List of Governors of Iowa#Living former governors. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 01:48, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Noted this through the notably wider infobox element, which contains a 6-column table. (see Uranium). Considerably widened. 1. Not a bad thing per se, except that relative image size now changed (i.e. it did not change absolutely), and there might be a guideline saying something about ideal infobox width ("33% body pagewidth max"?). The infobox now has fewer unforced line-wraps, but its whitespace is growing and growing. I hope this is within grand page-design philosophy. 2. Then I went to check a table that needs all 100% page width: {{Periodic table}} in Periodic table. No effect so OK, because it has cellpadding= set (without this, the wider padding is breaking bad, undesired & useless). This leads to these points: a) are there similar tables (using & needing 100% width) that are gravely affected this way, because they are without cellpadding set?, and b) if I remember correct, cellpadding= is deprecated. Though this depends on it. 3. Btw, is the padding in the infobox enlarged too (mostly visible with section headers)? Conclude: nothing broken so far for me, some questions left. -DePiep (talk) 08:14, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
{{Periodic table}} should not be affected because it's not using .wikitable, not because of the obsolete attributes being used. I did replace those attributes with proper CSS. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:34, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
I get this. (Had to squeeze out some ws). -DePiep (talk) 10:45, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
What is this central point where deprecated code (like this) is listed? I only meet such statements off and on. -DePiep (talk) 20:28, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia:HTML5. SiBr4 (talk) 21:09, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
My biggest problem with the table change is that this affects every single table on wikipedia. I don't understand why it was changed in the first place. The previous table size was just fine. And if you found that padding too small you could adjust the width by yourself. Now you have no option at all. Jahn1234567890 (talk) 14:08, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes. Why not make it 8px? -DePiep (talk) 20:28, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Hi Jahn1234567890. You can trivially reduce wikitable padding in your personal user CSS. In general, I think the increased padding looks better. The cited example above (List of Governors of Iowa#Living former governors) looks good to me. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:47, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Is there a central place where this whitespace philisophy is discussed? 'I think .. looks better' is not enough to me. -DePiep (talk) 20:52, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
I dunno about a central place. testwiki:Wikitable padding is where I did my testing. I don't think anything broke and there seems to be general consensus that the increased padding (0.3em 0.4em instead of 0.2em) is an improvement. There are quite a few studies that suggest that adding whitespace improves readability. Maybe that would be a better argument? --MZMcBride (talk) 20:58, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm lost. "I dunno", "don't think anything broke", "there seems to be general consensus" (where, where, WHERE I repeat). If this is the way classes are set, why are we talking anyway? Who cares. (and let me note that you still did not address my specific points). Make it 8px, I say. -DePiep (talk) 21:04, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
@MZMcBride: For results tables like this Dave Marcis the change makes tables like this look really untidy. Personally I'm unhappy with this change because with results tables in general this change makes those tables unnecessary big. But how would reduce wikitable padding in my personal user CSS? I haven't worked with this before. Jahn1234567890 (talk) 21:28, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Before I forget. Why was the table padding changed? It was just fine the way it was. I mean this change effects every wikitable on wikipedia. I think doubling the padding is a way to big change Jahn1234567890 (talk) 22:02, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

(un-indent) Hi. gerrit:188311 contains most of the relevant discussion. DePiep: If you want to propose 8px, a Gerrit changeset or Phabricator task is probably what you want. :-) Also, the English Wikipedia's technical village pump is just one of many venues to discuss technical changes. Jahn1234567890: You'll probably want to add the following code (or similar) to User:Jahn1234567890/common.css: 

table.wikitable > tr > th,
table.wikitable > tr > td,
table.wikitable > * > tr > th,
table.wikitable > * > tr > td {
    padding: 0;
}

Hope that helps. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:28, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

The concern is not just with Jahn1234567890, there are tables on wikipedia which are now unnecessarily huge for everyone. If there is a consensus to make this sitewide change (other than just MZMcBride and "a friend of his"), could a new class such as wikitablecompact be created that uses the old 0.2em padding? While affected tables could be rewritten to not use the wikitable class altogether (manually setting the style for each individual cell), it would be an major pain and create unnecessarily confusing code. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:25, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi Ahecht. Describing the increased padding as huge seems a bit extreme. I considered having wikitable variants, such as wikitable-compact, but the use-cases seemed to be pretty limited. If you'd like such variants available locally, we can modify MediaWiki:Common.css. This approach would require proposing alternatives and gaining local consensus to support the additional class(es) here. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:24, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
@MZMcBride: The Padding increase is'nt huge to you perhaps, but for a person like me who works with tables all the time it is more than a huge change. All the results tables I made during my stay on wikipedia are now way to huge and untidy when they should be compact. I mean all the work I have done. Thats feels like a slap in the face to me. I honestly have no idea why the padding whould be changed like that. A lot of people are far from happy with this change. And to be honest I haven't seen a lot people who are happy with this change. There are way to many tables that are affected by this (and not for the best most of the time). There has got to be some way to work this out, because I think it is far from unreasonable to keep this change when there is so much objection against this change. Jahn1234567890 (talk) 21:54, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Any design or user interface change is going to elicit some negative feedback. A few people have complained and there are various options available, including per-user and per-site customizations, as explained above. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:38, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
  • MZMcBride, you keep saying that this change was discussed, and referring to the gerrit page. Well, only developers read gerrit pages. This wasn't discussed with the people or projects that it affects. There's really no difference between a change that affects hundreds of thousands of pages made by WMF staff and changes that affect hundreds of thousands of pages made by volunteer developers: both should be discussed with the affected projects and communities before implementation. Basically, what I see here is one volunteer developer coming up with what he thinks is a cool idea, and having the connections to get it committed and distributed across WMF projects, without having discussed the proposal with anyone outside of the developer stream. That's pretty much the type of action that, when taken by WMF staff, you yourself have decried. I'd have expected better from you. Risker (talk) 22:57, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Hi Risker. Theoretically any change to MediaWiki core affects millions of pages... I don't see your point.

      The increased padding looks better on the whole. If you have proposals for discussing changes like this across 800-plus Wikimedia wikis (in addition to the thousands of non-Wikimedia MediaWiki wikis), please share. If you have specific technical problems to be addressed, please share.

      As it is, you seem to be arguing that a slight padding increase required extensive community consultation, which seems to be pretty insane. Do you really believe that's how development works or should work? --MZMcBride (talk) 23:04, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

      • No, MZM, what I expect is an analysis of the impact of the change and a method of informing groups that will be affected by the change of how it will affect them, and what they can do to mitigate the change. This is especially important when it comes to subjective changes that have not been requested anywhere by anyone and are, essentially, the wish and desire of a single developer. Risker (talk) 23:14, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
      • I'm sorry, but I disagree witht he change as well. 0.2em to 0.4em is doubling, not "slight", and it shows. Any change with such a visual impact should have been discussed, at least in Phabricator. The perceived improvement is subjective and there was no premise that prompted this change. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 23:26, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

(un-indent) Err, "flack" is a pretty generous term. Maybe a half-dozen people have commented, which is probably about equal to the number of people who reviewed the Gerrit change. It might've been best to not make this edit yourself. Do you know if any other wikis have noticed or cared about this change to the wikitable padding? If the objections are specific to the English Wikipedia, a local override is perhaps for the best. Or perhaps 0.2em 0.4em. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 05:17, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

If these comments had appreared on Phabricator, it would have been -2'd (rejected). If such a 'minor' change generates comments, it is generally a bad idea. All the above comments have merit, but I haven't seen you address a single one of them, ie. you can't explain why "it looks better". It is a subjective, unmeasurable criterium, which in itself is never a good reason for a change unless absolutely uncontested. That is not the case here. Please don't dismiss all comments as irrelevant; it makes you look as simply ignoring them. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:00, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
In MZ's defense, he did give a non-subjective reason: that sort of small increase (an absolute change of one-fifth of the width of a single character) to white space improves readability (for average readers, on average content).
I think that a more productive conversation to have would be this: What changes do we need to wikitext table settings, to be able to accommodate both readability for average tables (more white space) and common sense for other tables (e.g., less white space for cells that only contain a single number), without having to set CSS tags in every single cell? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:47, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
Edokter: I think this conversation has jumped the shark. Your comments are horribly wrong, but they're not really worth addressing. You've now imposed your preferred padding on the English Wikipedia; I think we can leave MediaWiki alone. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:36, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
Horribly wrong? You imposed a drastic change bypassing any discussion, which is not well received. What did you expect? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 00:01, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
There was discussion in Gerrit, you just don't approve of the venue. While you're trying to personalize this discussion by blaming me specifically, I only proposed this change. I didn't merge this change nor did I deploy this change. And I'll repeat that this change seems to have been well-received on the 800-plus other Wikimedia wikis. A few people on one wiki disagree with the change, as far as I can tell.
I've tried to avoid directly calling you out, but in this entire discussion, I've had the strong feeling that you're mostly upset that you (personally) weren't consulted about this change. And that seems a bit petty to me. Your local override seems to suggest the same mentality. Could you really not find any other local administrator to agree with you? You really felt it necessary to revert this padding change yourself when you'd already been involved in the discussion and clearly have a conflict? Your behavior here has every taste of "I wasn't consulted!" and "I disagree with changes where I wasn't consulted!" even when the change is beneficial. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:40, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T91890
I'm not blaming you personally... I'm trying to expose the absense of process with this change. You however seem to take this personally. I am addressing you because you stepped up defending the change, and systematically dismiss all complaints and arguments as non-existing. And it is irrelevant that I was not consusted... no one was consulted! I simply responded to complaints (which I happen to agree with). I don't know what you define as "well received"; please post examples of that. In the mean time, I will just open a tast to discuss the actual chhange. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 17:52, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Bullet points

When you look at the bullet points in for instance this AFD Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/New Downs - Are they extremely tiny ?,
As you can see from the picture they're absolutely tiny for me so I'm not sure if something here's changed or it's something to do with my laptop/chrome settings?,
Thanks, –Davey2010Talk 03:33, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

They appear at the normal size for me. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 03:35, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
There is some discussion of this at the top of #Tables just changed (using monobook). – Philosopher Let us reason together. 03:40, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks Mr. Stradivarius,
Philosopher - It actually appears to be a Chrome issue I think ?, I tried IE and they're normal but when I try Chrome logged out it still seems tiny, The font settings are all normal, I'll wipe everything and see if that does the trick, –Davey2010Talk 03:46, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Forgot to say I'm using Vector, Anyway nope all still the same, Well it looks like I partially have the Monobook issue...Just in Vector , Ah well thanks anyway ) –Davey2010Talk 04:44, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
It's a Webkit issue; Chrome fixed this last year (in Blink), so that should not be a problem (unless you have a really old Chrome version). -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:43, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Hi Edokter - Nope I'm using the latest version as far as I know (34.0.1847.116), Thanks, –Davey2010Talk 17:35, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Davey2010, that is old! The latest version is 40. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 17:47, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, as I noted at #New CSS in Firefox above, Chrome 40.0.2214.115m is current version. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:51, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Edokter Eh seriously?, I've been updating chrome the moment the 3 bars go green so how on earth could I have gone from using updated versions to old ?.....Unless without me knowing Chrome hasen't been updating at all for quite some time?, I really don't no!, Anyway thanks for solving the mystery ) –Davey2010Talk 18:13, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
By the looks of it my browser hasen't updated itself since April 2014 ..... Great!, Anyway thanks all for your help :) –Davey2010Talk 18:24, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
Safari 8 on OS X Yosemite (Wikipedia home page)
Chrome 40.0.2214 on Android 5.0 (TouchWiz)
I've got the same problem with Safari 8.0.3 (latest version) on OS X 10.10.2 (see screenshot on the right). The bullet points have about the same size and position as full stops. SelfishSeahorse (talk) 13:40, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Same problem on Chrome for Android 40.0.2214.109 running Android 5.0 on my Galaxy S5(SM-G900V). Really annoying becuase they look like messed up periods. EoRdE6(Come Talk to Me!) 19:25, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Ping and pong

{{ping}} is very close to {{pong}}—since I and O are very close on the QWERTY keyboard it's a common typo that I'll readily admit to making.

Proposal: a vanity template to take advantage of this fact in a humorous manner.

For example, @Resident Mario:, or @Mr. Stradivarius: (versus @Resident Mario: or @Mr. Stradivarius:) ResMar 21:01, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Apologies to Stradivarius in advance for using him as a guinea pig! ResMar 21:02, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
Pong (disambiguation) says: "Pong, in computer networking jargon, a response to a ping". It may be confusing if you use pong as a synonym for ping instead of a response, but I suppose you could make documentation which suggests use when you alert a user who pinged you. See also Ping-pong scheme. <pedant alert>I could have used it to "pong" you but you didn't release the image as public domain so attribution is required and your template doesn't link to the file page.</pedant alert> PrimeHunter (talk) 21:32, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Ah, sorry, File:Pong ball in flight.svg is the one, I've pubbed it now. It wouldn't be too hard to reverse the image (and host it from the other side of the template if need be). ResMar 23:42, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
I removed my template from this discussion to free up my sandbox, sorry, heh. ResMar 04:46, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Problems with non-unique section titles

(See WP:Village pump (technical)/Archive 126#Link to a section in a Wikipedia article)

When section titles are not-unique, the TOC still works fine, the 2nd section has _2 appended to its #anchor link; the 3rd, _3, and so on.

But the system fails in two other situations I know about.

When you edit a section, WP pre-fills the edit summary with /* ≶section title> */, which is turned into a → linking to the section. This works fine provided the section names are unique. But WP isn't smart enough, so the summary of an edit in the 2nd or following identically-named section will include a misleading → link to the first section by the same name.

Also, after completing a section edit, WP automatically scrolls to the beginning of the section being edited. This, too, fails when section names are not unique. If you edit the 2nd section, you'll get scrolled back to the beginning of the first section.

For example, the article Properties of metals, metalloids and nonmetals, the first and third section have parallel sub-section names

When I made this dummy edit to 2nd Metals section, WP pre-filled the edit summary with /* Metals */, which got changed to →, pointing to the first Metals section, and when I saved the edit, my browser scrolled to the 1st (not 2nd) Metals section.

Has this made it into the buglist? YBG (talk) 07:03, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Yep, back in 2004. These issues are T4831 and T2111, respectively. Matma Rex talk 08:37, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

X!'s tool not working

See https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-ec/?user=Anthonyhcole&project=en.wikipedia.org

It is linked at the bottom of every user "contributions page". --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 13:29, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

  • Anthonyhcole, Xtools seems to be running, but apparently there is some db lag or some other db issue (that's why it's reporting as all 0s, no data coming back from the db). Not much xtools can do about labs issues, sorry. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 14:34, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-11

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

Recent changes

  • You can now create books on almost all wikis. It doesn't work yet on wikis using the language converter. [23] [24]
  • VisualEditor had problems with categories in Safari. It sometimes moved or removed the categories. The issue is now fixed. [25] [26] [27]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 11 (calendar).
  • In VisualEditor the "Edit beta" button is now called "Edit" on the English Wikipedia. [28] [29]
  • The feedback tool in VisualEditor now looks like the other tools. It also asks for information about your browser to help fix bugs. [30] [31]
  • You now see the VisualEditor toolbar even if the rest of the page is still loading. [32] [33]
  • You now see more information when you edit a link, a reference or other items in VisualEditor. You also see a clearer edit button in those tools. [34] [35]
  • If you use the ContentTranslation tool you now see red links in the list of articles in other languages. The link is red if the article doesn't exist in the language of your options or of your browser. You can translate the article by clicking on the red link.

Meetings

  • You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join a technical meeting in France in May. You can ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [36]

Future changes

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

15:19, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

stats.grok.se broken again?

The website hasn't updated since the 5th. Previously, pageviews for a day would be available the following day. But there hasn't been updates in five days.

Also, should it be time to create a parallel tool on Wikimedia Labs, if only as a backup? Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 23:11, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

There is already another tool at https://tools.wmflabs.org/#toollist-wikiviewstats but it has been completely down for a long time, at least each time I checked. I don't know whether there is work or plans for it. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:11, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Suppressing Infobox Person

Hi, could somebody give me the coding in my preferences to suppress Template:Infobox person in an article and to replace a photo if in the infobox with a formatted photo in place set at 250px with the caption given in the infobox?♦ Dr. Blofeld 14:27, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

@Dr. Blofeld: I know how to suppress the display of the whole of {{infobox person}} - it's 
table.infobox.biography { display: none; }
in Special:MyPage/common.css - but I don't know how to do put the image back in replacement. I suspect that Javascript is necessary. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:37, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi Dr. Blofeld. Can you please provide some specific examples of articles using {{Infobox person}} and the specific images that you're trying to suppress? Can you please also provide some examples of articles using this infobox (or a different infobox) and examples of images you're trying to not suppress?
You probably need a small JavaScript script to do this. Having a list of test cases would be very helpful in developing such a script.
Finally, can you please provide a link to the image ("formatted photo") you would like to replace the natural infobox image with? --MZMcBride (talk) 15:52, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi, much appreciate the response both. Basically instead of the infobox to have it as it was before with the image, although 250px at standard [39]. Infobox architect feeds into infobox person at the moment but not sure if it would work for infobox architect. Basically on any arts biographical article which has a redundant (in my opinion) infobox like that I'd like to be able to suppress it and have clean photograph in place of it. Angelina Jolie, for instance instead of that infobox with the trivia on family to just display her image at 250px with the caption in the infobox. If something can feed off the image parameter of the infobox and just put the image there, can that be done? Something like if image (in infobox person or architect, display [File:xxx.jpg|thumb|250px|Caption=]]... ♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:31, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
It could probably be done without javascript if some css classes were added to Template:Infobox person, with something along the lines of 
table.infobox.biography tr { display: none; } table.infobox.biography tr.main-image, table.infobox.biography tr.main-image-caption { display: table-row; }
. —Cryptic 01:57, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Something like this seems to sort of work with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: 

$('.infobox tr').each(function() { $(this).children(":not([colspan='2'])").parent().css('display', 'none') });

For more complex cases such as Barack Obama, this approach wouldn't work as well. It's also not clear how/when you'd trigger this suppression. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:19, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

infobox.person { display: none; } didn't work for me. I think it's time that the foundation and developers like Jorm (WMF) acknowledged that disputes over infoboxes are very common on here and to make wikipedia more flexible by suppressing them in biographies. Perhaps the intention is to centralize them in wiki data. If they do so, then there should be the option from user to user whether to suppress certain ones or not. Looks like I'll just have to ignore them for the time being. Thanks anyway.♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:39, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Such disputes occur in discussion of a very, very tiny percentage of articles, and do not involve many editors at all. Most editors, and most readers, seem to welcome the inclusion of infoboxes. The Foundation would be foolish to squander time and effort on such an esoteric request. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:35, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
I don't know who you're trying to kid Andy but virtually every featured article I've been involved with in the last 2 years has had an infobox either imposed or attempted to be imposed on them. I respect that the people advocating them like to see consistency across articles and make infoboxes uniform, but you don't see it from the other perspective Andy and have a habit of gunning down anybody who doesn't agree with you with arrogant IDONTLIKEIT arguments. There is certainly a significant number of experienced editors here who loathe them in biographies. This is a very real issue, the disputes on talk pages often go on for weeks. KJP1 in fact stated recently that he was appalled with the time wasting and passion gone into the infobox dispute when it could be used to write articles. He's right. It should never get to that. There should be the option there to customise pages for each editor, rather than assuming everybody must have an infobox and likes them. And by that I don't just mean infoboxes, I mean options like a whole page option when reading to suppress the sidebar, a much wider range of tools to give readers the desired look they want. Everybody is different.♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:40, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
I'm not trying to kid anyone so please don't impugn my motives. The set of "virtually every featured article [you've] been involved with in the last 2 years" is far from being the set of all our articles, or even from being representative of it. Likewise, you and the other the editors to which you refer are not representative of all of our editors, let alone representative of all of our readers. My arguments are not (unlike the "loathing" of others) IDONTLIKEIT; I have explained the reasons why infoboxes are beneficial, at length and with supporting evidence. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:20, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Nevertheless, Dr. Blofeld, you could try pasting this: 

table.infobox.biography tr {display:none;}
table.infobox.biography tr:first-of-type + tr {display:table-row;}

into your common.css - find it at User:Dr. Blofeld/common.css

I don't guarantee that it must work on every biography - and it won't work on old browsers, but it might make wiki-life just a bit more tolerable for you. I really hope it helps. --RexxS (talk) 22:41, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

RexxS Thanks for that! It seems to work! Is there any way of ridding of the box outline around the photos though?♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:53, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
Yes, just add a new line:
table.infobox.biography {border:none;}
underneath the other lines in User:Dr. Blofeld/common.css. It won't be perfect, but it's close to what you ask for. If you find you would like a faint border then use table.infobox.biography {border:1px solid #EEE;} instead. --RexxS (talk) 20:31, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
@Dr. Blofeld: Assuming that in your post of 11:39, 8 March 2015 you mean this version - no, it wouldn't have worked for you (or for anybody else), because infobox.person is not a valid selector: there is no such HTML element as <infobox>...</infobox>, and even if there were, "person" is not a class that is used on Wikipedia biography pages. If you look at the CSS blobs above, there is always a dot before the word "infobox" and this dot tells your browser that "infobox" is a class, not an element. Punctuation is critical in CSS, not optional. In my first example, I used the selector table.infobox.biography which means 'a HTML <table>...</table> element which has the class "infobox" and also the class "biography"'. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:44, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T18691

Am I the only one seeing two snakes with the message "link to this section" at the head of discussion sections? GoodDay (talk) 00:46, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

It's a section sign added recently. You can remove it with this in your CSS:
.mw-headline-anchor {display: none;}
PrimeHunter (talk) 00:59, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
I don't understand. GoodDay (talk) 01:02, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
@GoodDay: There's a help page at Help:User style. In short, create the page User:GoodDay/common.css and add the code that PrimeHunter gave you to it. Then the snakes will disappear. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:11, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
I tested it with show preview & was warned the code would compromise my account. GoodDay (talk) 01:12, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
I think I'll put up with the double snakes. I'm not fussy about venturing into unknown territory. GoodDay (talk) 01:16, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
It's a good idea to be careful of things that you add to your personal JS and CSS pages, but in this case the code is safe, so don't let that deter you this time. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:29, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps those who implimented the section sign, will eventually chose to remove it. Doing so myself, is too risky for me :) GoodDay (talk) 01:47, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
The code is perfectly harmless and nearly the same is at WP:CSSHIDE. Your JS and CSS pages always show a standard warning, even when you preview a blank page. Administrators like Mr. Stradivarius and I can actually post code in MediaWiki:Common.js and MediaWiki:Common.css which is automatically run by all people who view an English Wikipedia page, or at least those with JavaScript and CSS in their browsers. Administrators can also edit your personal JS and CSS files, but will almost never do so unless you request it, or possibly if you made a user script shared by others but don't maintain it. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:59, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
We really must do something about that "Code that you insert on this page" message, it causes too much worry, and it comes up every few months. See 27 February 2009; 13 July 2010; 26 May 2011; 15 October 2011; 27 November 2011; 9 December 2011; 1 November 2012; 2 June 2013; 8 July 2013; 2 January 2014; 3 April 2014; 8 April 2014; 20 June 2014; 13 September 2014; and 19 October 2014. It's held in MediaWiki:Jswarning, and is displayed on user CSS pages via MediaWiki:Usercsspreview. The last discussion on this matter at MediaWiki talk:Jswarning was over three years ago. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:45, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
I love the snake description! but § is a section sign (used throughout law to indicate a statutory section). Anyway, anyone know of any discussion anywhere not of how we remove it through personal CSS or opting out, etc., but why it was a good idea to make this change everywhere in the first place, and whether it should be removed as a global change?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:42, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
And out of curiosity, what is the purpose of this? If it's to provide an easy way to copy a link to a section without going up to the TOC, it would be cool if it went straight to clipboard (yes, I'm aware that some browser implementations are paranoid about this). Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 02:00, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
A Phabricator: search of "mw-headline-anchor" gave phab:T18691. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:05, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
@GoodDay: If it means anything, I just added the above code to my CSS page and it worked a treat, no more snakes! - JuneGloom07 Talk 02:27, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
I won't bother with mine. GoodDay (talk) 02:29, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
Snakes on a Wiki? Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 07:44, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
For what it's worth, the CSS code to disable the links didn't work with my screen reader JAWS in either common.css or monobook.css; code like that usually does what it's meant to, but maybe the fact that it's in a heading confused the screen reader. I had to use JAWS' Flexible Web feature (telling it to hide elements with the CSS class to disable the section links. Graham87 09:29, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
JAWS? We're gonna need a bigger wiki. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 09:51, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
To return to the original q, i.e. what's with the snakes, see the phabricator ticket linked from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Archive 13#Imminent MediaWiki feature that will impact accessibility for screen reader users. This ticket was raised in December 2008, but you may not be able to read anything older than about 16 February 2015, for reasons that whilst known, are still unclear to me. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:20, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
The Bugzilla url would have been https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16691. A Google search on that gave http://wikibugs-l.narkive.com/5RSNaeK4/bug-16691-new-section-headings-should-have-some-clickable-anchor-for-passing-links. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:30, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
Just for the record, Bugzilla is still available in read-only mode at old-bugzilla.wikimedia.org. For example, https://old-bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16691 works. Matma Rex talk 17:29, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
This is a known issue that will hopefully be fixed after next Phabricator update (T89690). In the meantime https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T18691?before=1 (note the ?before=1) shows all comments on the task. wctaiwan (talk) 21:46, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
  • Isn't it great that WMF implements things we all hate and or find utterly useless ..... Other than Diffs I never need to use the URL bit here so personally not seeing any point to it but meh that's my 2¢ on it, Anyway thanks PrimeHunter for the code :) –Davey2010Talk 16:33, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
I don't see the point either. This basically saves us the enormous hassle of scrolling up to the table of contents? It doesn't offer nearly enough of a benefit to justify the distraction. --Bongwarrior (talk) 18:28, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
Bongwarrior - If you're on the bottom page or an area where the title is in the middle of the page - Clicking the snake thing next to a title makes that title/section go to the top of the screen .... So what's the benefit of that ?.....You may aswell just stick to using the scroll bar ? .... I honestly am not seeing any point to this ? ... –Davey2010Talk 21:36, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
My bad I didnt read everything here - Meh it makes sense but personally I prefer scrolling to TOC, Been used to it for years. –Davey2010Talk 21:45, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
Credit where credit is due: this was implemented by a volunteer developer ([40]). wctaiwan (talk) 22:16, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
  • Yeah this is incredibly useless feature, yet when people want other things it takes months to get implemented... My question is why no one decided to start even the smallest discussion or notice of the change. Here was me scouring through my gadgets trying to figure our where these bloody snakes were coming from! EoRdE6(Come Talk to Me!) 19:47, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
They did actually mention it at the end of #Tech News: 2015-10 which was posted in a lot of places across Wikimedia sites. You can even sign up to get Tech News delivered to your talk page: meta:Global message delivery/Targets/Tech ambassadors. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:05, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
This has been a feature request since 2008, so I think it's taken a little longer than "months". Legoktm (talk) 22:10, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
  • I for one think it is a positive change (so long as it doesn't impact usability). Makes it stupidly easy to copy links to article/page sections. *If* it were to be removed globally, is there some CSS or JS code to add it personally? — Huntster (t @ c) 23:13, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
    I agree. It was pretty annoying to have to scroll all the way up to the top of the page to get the section link URL (and that's assuming there is a TOC). Protip: you can use this with {{u2w}} to get nicely formatted wikilinks. — Mr. Stradivarius on tour ♪ talk ♪ 05:06, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
That's handy. Since some people don't want to see the snake and aren't comfortable editing their CSS, could we add a checkbox somewhere to Preferences?
I find it irritating and distracting but I could see a use for it - if it gave a wikilink and not a URL. When linking to a section, one mostly is doing so in house - well, this one is... I suppose a choice would be too much to ask for, as would requesting that it appeared when one was on the left side of the heading and not way off to the right. Peridon (talk) 12:30, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
@Peridon: It happens when you mouseover a heading element of level 2 or deeper. Most browsers treat a heading element as occupying the full width of the page, even if the text of that heading is significantly shorter. In Wikipedia, level 2 headings are given a pale grey border along their bottom edges (as are level 1 headings, i.e. page titles); this demonstrates that the heading is full-width. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:26, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
  • Okay, so I was unsure about all this as well, and this discussion itself didn't offer me much explanation when I read it. Basically, per MW:Requests for comment/Clickable section anchors and the comments that don't appear to be on that page but instead are on Phab:T18691, the purpose is to change the URL in your URL bar (if you have one) to a link directly to the section you are at or to make it possible to right click and copy the URL for the section you are at without having to scroll back to the top of a long page to click the link in the TOC to make it happen. It is very useful indeed for those on a PC, with JavaScript enabled, and with a URL. Everyone else, it's basically useless. It's not compatible with touch devices, it won't show up for people without .js or with .js disabled, and while they could probably right click on it and copy the link destination, if you don't have a URL bar displayed (my university has them removed from the interface by default for some reason on the lab computers for example) you won't see the result. I also don't like its "Easter Egg" style implementation (despite the fact we are just weeks away from Easter itself). I'm not sure why this option was chosen, it wasn't even the first option and has the most drawbacks in my opinion. I've commented on the Phab ticket, and personally think option 1 was the best option (I've explained why in the ticket as well). I've also suggested that those that like the currently implementation should be allowed to keep it by turning it into an opt-in gadget. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 13:53, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
    • I haven't decided yet whether I personally care for the new feature, but it does work fine with JS disabled since it's implemented entirely with CSS. It also works on my Android phone in Firefox (on the desktop site, of course) if I touch on the header to activate it, although it does not in Chrome. Anomie⚔ 14:42, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
    • FWIW I think it's a good feature, because I sometimes forced a __TOC__ manually only to get the fragment (encoded section link) for a link to a section on pages without a ToC. –Be..anyone (talk) 09:35, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
  • For what it's worth - not much at all, I know, because the WMF are bound and determined to render the interface unusable except for those on particular types of bleeding-edge computer set-ups - I find this thing annoying clutter and still don't understand how I'm supposed to use it. It appears, I attempt to click on it, nothing happens. I can and do get the link for a section header by copying and pasting the section header and adding a #. In addition, what the fourpence-a-pound are the black vertical lines that started briefly appearing to the left of each item in my watchlist when I bring up or refresh that page? They made their eyestraining appearance at the same time. Do the WMF want that badly to give us all tension headaches? Yngvadottir (talk) 16:15, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
  • I don't personally care much one way or the other (although it's one more inexplicable symbol on a page that could well be distracting to readers and its purpose isn't obvious at all), but I am quite concerned about the accessibility issue. I thought MediaWiki was trying to *reduce* accessibility problems, not add to them. Yet up above we have a user with a screen reader identifying that it is a problem, and comments on phabricator indicate that should be a prerequisite to being applied. It was merged too soon (it also has other issues besides mucking up screen readers) and not tested thoroughly enough. I don't actually blame the volunteer developer(s) for this; it's up to the people who are giving +2 and have the access and authority to upload changes to make sure that the issues already raised have been addressed. Risker (talk) 16:29, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
    • This will be further addressed in the next few weeks. We just need to align a bit on exactly how. As someone who has made considerable efforts towards the accessibility of Wikipedia, and someone who actually saw this fly by (but did not review), I apologize for not mentally flagging it as a potential accessibility problem. It's difficult catching these issues sometimes, it's not something you think about all the time. We only have 2 devs sort of experienced with this topic, one parttime wikidata dev (aka mostly volunteer when working on this) and one volunteer (me). We can't review everything that everyone else does all the time and even if we get invited for a review, sometimes we simply don't have the time. But we do keep an eye out, and do strive to such issues. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:27, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
      • Thanks very much, TheDJ, for reviewing this. It sort of strains my brain to think that something as important as accessibility doesn't receive in-house support, or that there isn't any expected or required testing standard related to accessibility prior to code implementation. It's a lot of responsibility to leave resting on the shoulders of a couple of respected volunteers. Risker (talk) 15:46, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

§ on the left

I keep the edit buttons over to the right hand side of the page (in Monobook) which is where I like them to be. Now, when my cursor goes to an edit button, a grey § appears on the left hand side by the heading. Why, and is there some way of getting rid of it? I find it distracting, irritating and unnecessary. Peridon (talk) 11:48, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Just found out that it happens anywhere in the Heading line. Peridon (talk) 11:49, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
See Help:DSL; discussion at #Link to this section snake. --  Gadget850 talk 11:59, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
I call it a paragraph sign not a snake... (It's a standard proofing sign meaning 'paragraph break needed'.) Thanks. Peridon (talk) 12:24, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
You are thinking of pilcrow (¶) perhaps.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:50, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

When and why did the Section sign get added to mainspace articles?

Hi all,
When I mouse-over some but not all mainspace articles, a clickable § pops up in front of the section name.
When and why did this enhancement happen?
Mostly clueless about techernogical things aka --Shirt58 (talk) 11:51, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

See Help:DSL; discussion at #Link to this section snake. --  Gadget850 talk 12:00, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
D'oh. Note to self: read page before posting. Thanks, Gadget850. --Shirt58 (talk) 08:33, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Symbol to use

The symbol itself can be changed (or removed altogether) at MediaWiki:Section-symbol. Would be better ?  Cenarium (talk) 21:06, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

No. The pilcrow is a paragraph sign; the link shown is to a section, not a paragraph. This also matches the behavior of {{section link}}. --  Gadget850 talk 21:47, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm surprised to be told, on its talk page, that Navigation popups is "abandonware". Are there any coders willing to tackle the feature requests for this immensely useful tool? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:36, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, isn't that functionality basically superseded by a proper extension called Popups / Hovercards, if I get it right? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:53, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
@AKlapper (WMF): As an experiment I turned off popups and turned on Hovercards. Now when I look at my watchlist or at recent changes, I see no popup information when I look at a "diff", "hist" or "contribs" link. When I point at an article link, I see a preview but no way to access the history or the diffs of the last edits. So, no, Hovercards is not a replacement for popups. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:15, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
The new popups is nice, but it only does short previews of content. It doesn't give you actions, diffs or any of the many other previews that navpopups can give you. But the original popups is from 2003... it's a pain to maintain, does everything itself, and does so much, that it's difficult to reimplement in a modern way. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:22, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
@AKlapper (WMF): Navigation popups is a tool I use everyday. It does no good to characterize it in a way that suggests its use will not be accommodated. Where should I go to ensure its continued survival? --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 11:28, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
@Ancheta Wis: I'm not sure why you ask me. But thanks everybody for explaining that its functionality is way broader than I had expected from a quick read! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:31, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for attempting to reply. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 11:40, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
"Where should I go to ensure its continued survival?" It's like that old dark barn on the side of the scouting grounds. It still works, but it's slowly rotting away and no one want to replace 1/3 of the planks and paint the whole thing with tar front to back... in the mean time, someone's dad dropped off an ugly but fancy new container. It's too white and new, is way smaller, but at least there's no draft. We could still paint the barn if all the scouts would get off their phones and picked up paintbrushes......But it's simply not happening. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:47, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
For the record, it has the most users at Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences#Gadgets. Thank you to the coders who so far prevent it from collapsing. At least there will only be whining users outside and not innocent children inside if it does. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:57, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
40.897 users with Navpopups activated in enwiki alone. Add to those the users in other wikis (i.e. de:MediaWiki_Diskussion:Gadgets-definition/Archiv_2013#old-diff-style.css: 5913? in 2013). --Atlasowa (talk) 14:26, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: The idea in the future is to have a hovercards setting for editors, see mw:Topic:S9xysb7xlucu4hyz and the screenshot at mw:File:HovercardsSettings V2.png. Hope this helps! EoRdE6(Come Talk to Me!) 19:57, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, but no, it doesn't. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:10, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
Hovercards looks very nice, but I don't see much similarity to Navigation popups. Mr Stephen (talk) 20:13, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
I think it's safe to say that Hovercards was inspired by Navpopups, but it's apples to oranges in functionality and purpose. Hovercards a reading tool that can help keep you from falling down the rabbit hole when you need to keep reading relevant things, Navpopups is an editor tool that provides functionality for cleaning up the website. Keegan (talk) 22:11, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
If you read the link, again if you missed it, the plan for THE FUTURE is to have hovercards have more editor features. How far in the future is anyones guess but thats the idea. EoRdE6(Come Talk to Me!) 04:15, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
I think it's good we take the time to establish what's the status quo now; i.e. two different things, to attempt to answer the question at hand. The answer to the question at hand is that Navpopups receives life support every year or two or three to keep it running, so it's not quite abandonware. It's not getting bug fixes nor features. Hovercards is new, with recent development; however, the target future features are not on the table right now so it remains a project with different focus. Keegan (talk) 07:56, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

RefToolbar

We seem to have the same problem with Wikipedia:RefToolbar (see its talk page). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:48, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

See also phab:T71550. Helder 20:39, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Autocomplete gadget

autocomplete script is widely used gadget in Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedias and can help users to quickly fill links, templates and templates parameters in the editbox. I would like to promote autocomplete script to a gadget here too, so English Wikipedia users can take advantage of this useful gadget. Eran (talk) 06:32, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Do you have the non-minify'd source available for review? Nakon 06:37, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
he:MediaWiki:Gadget-autocomplete.js [add ?uselang=en if you don't like the Hebrew interface :) ] Eran (talk) 06:40, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
I've replaced my main JS page but am not able to utilize the script. Would you be able to provide any technical assistance to get this working? Is this script configured to use LTR on this wiki? Thanks, Nakon 06:49, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
  • The gadget is configurated to LTR here.
  • importScript function is used to import internal scripts, use instead 
    mw.loader.load('//bits.wikimedia.org/he.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=he&modules=ext.gadget.autocomplete');
Eran (talk) 06:56, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
This might be because I'm using the legacy monobook. I'll try it with the new template and I'll let you know how it works out. Nakon 07:08, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
i doubt monobook has anything to do with it. just added &useskin=monobook to address line, and the gadget (or rather script) continues to work flawlessly. however, some gadgets may be incompatible with this one. specifically, if you have wikEd activated, you want to turn it off for this gadget to take effect. you can search for users using this gadget (click "advanced" and select "User" namespace) - there are several dozens users on enwiki already using it via WP:JS. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 15:05, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
  • Support - I find it very useful, and so would many others. It would be good to make it more discoverable by including it on the gadgets tab in Preferences. Very few people know about WP:JS. Ijon (talk) 14:40, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
  • Support This is brilliant. Like a live search as you type out template and page names with {{ and [[. This will be tremendously helpful and timesaving! — MusikAnimal talk 05:13, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Assyrian pages won't open

This is very strange: almost every time I try to open any Wikipedia page related to the Assyrians using Google Chrome, I get an error message from the browser and the page won't load. It happens wether or not I'm signed in, but not on other browsers. I'd guess it has something to do with the Assyrian script on the pages. Anyone else had this problem?  Liam987(talk) 23:46, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Works for me, in Chrome (current main release). — xaosflux Talk 04:52, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
I believe this may be the same as phab:T88478, Chrome bug report at [41]. The tab doesn't crash every time I don't think. — MusikAnimal talk 05:25, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Media viewer problem -- Chrome and Firefox.

Clicking an image that is opened in the media viewer, then going back with the browser's back button, then clicking it again, and going back again will lose the place of the scroll position in the original page. --Agamemnus (talk) 04:14, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

phab:T65892 is closed but maybe phab:T73796 is related? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:25, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
Not sure. It didn't work at all at first (and I noticed this), but they fixed it in phab:T65892 (and I also noticed this). However, they only partially fixed it, since it comes back when you go back and forth as I described. The second ticket you refer to mentions that all that code is hack upon hack, so maybe that is why this stuff keeps breaking in various places... iunno. Guess I should register maybe and post a reply to the first (closed) bug. Does anyone read replies to closed bugs? --Agamemnus (talk) 18:40, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
Whoever is in the Subscribers list of a task receives notifications about that task depending on each subscriber's personal notification settings. However if you have found a new bug, a new task might be more effective including a reference to the older existing task. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Reminder: VisualEditor's weekly triage meeting tomorrow

Hi everybody. This week's triage meeting will happen on Wednesday, 11 March 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (19:00 UTC). We hope to see you there - in case you can't make it, please remember you can still nominate "blocker" tasks in advance on Phabricator, or you can read the IRC logs and minutes which are usually published shortly after the end of the meeting, so you can catch up on what was discussed. So see the meetings page on mediawiki.org for details (notice the new format, a Google Hangout). Thank you, and talk to you soon, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:14, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Page view statistics - status down from 5 march 2015

Hello. Page view statistics don't working from 5 march 2015 in english, polish and spanish Wikipedia (and probably in much more). --Swd (talk) 09:18, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Confirmed. No Page count stats for any page since that date apparently. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 13:16, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
A link to see the problem would be welcome. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
See the last 90 days for Mount Hood which is usually examined 300-500 times per day. Notice that there is no information since 2015-03-06, no matter how the data is viewed. —EncMstr (talk) 19:24, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Page protection levels

Is it possible to add (trough request at Phabricator) protection level for any existing user right groups? For example, at Latvian Wikipedia we would like to add new protection level, so that pages can be edited by autopatrolled users and sysops. Yes, we have autopatrolled user group enabled. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:00, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi Edgars2007, are you talking about FlaggedRevisions? And do you mean polish/german WP style or russian WP style? Have a look at meta:Flagged Revisions (and talk page). --Atlasowa (talk) 15:54, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
No, i'm talking simply about page protection. autopatrolled users was just an example. Currently we (Latvian Wikipedia) have protection level 1, so that pages can be edited only by registred users and protection level 2, so that pages can be edited only by admins. I'm not asking this @Phabricator, because here I could get some respones faster. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:21, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
Yes, it is possible. File a request at Phabricator with #wikimedia-site-requests project. See m:Requesting wiki configuration changes. --Glaisher (talk) 16:24, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. That's all I wanted to know. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:29, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Help

At the Teahouse (and here as I just discovered) editing isn't working. There isn't any edit buttons. I use a phone and chrome, no app. It is why I had to put this at the top. The only edit button on this page and teahouse is the top one. Also there are no drop down menus. Because of this I can't reply to anyone here if I need too. I also can't fix a typo in this after posting for example. This issue is (my guess) only on mobile and only on pages that has Wikipedia: in the title. This issue needs to be fixed ASAP. If I have to reply I have to do it on your talk page. Normal pages are fine, this issue doesn't happen on normal pages. If I switch to desktop mode, it's the same thing. Help!!! Ping me or since I can't reply here, reply at my talk page to keep the conversation in one spot, it doesn't matter though. --DangerousJXD (talk) 10:36, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

@DangerousJXD: Going to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions (mobile version) in Chrome 41 on my desktop computer and switching to "Desktop" at the bottom, I do see an "[edit]" link next to the section heading (the mobile version indeed does not offer this). Hence I cannot reproduce the problem. --Malyacko (talk) 15:04, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
@DangerousJXD: I've fixed it with this edit to Template:TH question page. It looks like the mobile skin has recently stopped being able to collapse sections and display edit links on pages with unbalanced div tags. Removing unclosed divs in the header removed some of the pretty formatting from the page, but at least now you can edit it from your phone. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 04:02, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

How likely is it that Wikipedia would crash due to a 184 title page move?

I have submitted a multiple page move request for this number of pages and one of the objections was related to this worry. Comments would be appreciated. GregKaye 22:50, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

250 page moves were carried out in the 6 hours prior to this comment, a rate of moves that is more or less typical. An additional few hundred should cause no noticeable problems. - TB (talk) 23:44, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
WP:PERF, it won't. Legoktm (talk) 23:57, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
  • 184 is a really small number. Even if it was 1840 page moves, I'd have no concerns about any issues being caused by that. I'd have no worries if someone was deleting 2000 revisions of a page (if it was over 5000 revisions, I might worry a little, but there are safeties for that in place). So, TL;DR answer, 184 page moves is nothing. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 01:46, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Template:AFC submission

I posted on WT:AFC#Bug with open ref tags regarding a bug that Newyorkadam and I stumbled upon which I presume is in {{AFC submission}}. Would any of you technically minded editors have a look at it? Thanks, -- Sam Sailor Talk! 11:08, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

It's not a bug in {{AFC submission}}. It's merely that if there is an unterminated ref the rest of the content of the page is regarded as being part of the ref (but an error message is given to highlight the problem). Hence the {{subst:submit}} was never parsed. I've completed the correction which Newyorkadam started but which you had reversed. --David Biddulph (talk) 11:29, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
The real bug is the often reported phab:T4700, here meaning that {{subst:}} does not work in ref tags. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:16, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Receiving incorrect notifications

I have recently received notifications that edits I made were reverted, even though they weren't reverted at all. They were simply edits ([42] [43]) that followed mine. Tvx1 18:10, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

In each case the edit reverted at least part of your change. Even the first line of the change is a reversion of your change. - David Biddulph (talk) 18:20, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
The notification is caused by clicking "undo" or "rollback" (only some have the latter feature), and eventually saving the edit. The users probably clicked "undo", removed the prefilled edit summary, and manually made some changes in the edit box before saving. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:05, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
Also possible is that they were on the page history, and used "undo" after they either (i) clicked a "cur" link for any revision other than the second from top or (ii) selected two non-consecutive revisions and used Compare selected revisions. When you do either of these, you are undoing more than one revision, which might have been made by more than one different person; and so neither a single edit number nor a single user name are suitable, so the default edit summary is blank. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:45, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikimedia error

Just for documentation, I got this several times about an hour ago. I meant to copy the details and forgot to do it before it finally went to the right page.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:02, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

The whole site was down for that period. There was no root cause posted to the Server Admin Log, but from inspection it likely was related to a DoS or error with the mobile cache servers. In any case, seems to have been resolved quickly. Mamyles (talk) 19:46, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
Curious. Around that time I noticed what may have been unusually heavy DNS traffic on an entirely separate system. I wonder if there were any global problems. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:18, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

SUL finalization update

Hi all, please read this page for important information and an update involving SUL finalization, scheduled to take place in one month. Thanks. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Statistics
year of last edit number of affected accounts
no edits or only deleted ones 410,748
2001 402
2002 516
2003 1,123
2004 3,500
2005 8,947
2006 22,138
2007 21,060
2008 14,798
2009 8,517
2010 6,614
2011 6,056
2012 4,394
2013 3,883
2014 3,487
2015 942
Overall 517,125
number of edits (excluding imported edits) number of affected accounts
≥10.000 25
1.000–9.999 277
100–999 2,247
10–99 16,994
2–9 53,349
1 45,574
0 398,659
Overall 517,125
number of edits (excluding imported edits) number of affected accounts with last edit 2014/15
≥10.000 14
1.000–9.999 106
100–999 498
10–99 1,562
2–9 1,522
1 726
0 1
Overall 4,429

Change hatnote

I'd like to change a hatnote at ISIL from :

"ISIL" and "ISIS" redirect here. For other uses, see ISIL (disambiguation) and ISIS (disambiguation).

to:

"ISIL", "Isil" and "ISIS" redirect here. For other uses, see ISIL (disambiguation) and Isis (disambiguation).

When I try this I get the message (in red) saying:

Lua error: invalid expiry date ("22 March "ISIL" and "ISIS" redirect here. For other uses, see ISIL (disambiguation) and ISIS (disambiguation).2015").

Can we get round this or track this down pls?

Thanks GregKaye 02:37, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Your code works for me in preview. The error message sounds like hatnote code is mixed up with the following {{pp-vandalism|expiry=22 March 2015|small=yes}}. Try again. If it still fails then post code producing the actual error message here, or save it in the article so you can post a diff before reverting to a working version. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:05, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Thank you PrimeHunter, I'm learning. GregKaye 14:12, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Infobox Legislature

Could someone explain why in the here shown infobox the 2nd session, omitting the "sessionend" parameter shows a single date in the box, while at the 4th session the "sessionend" parameter is required. If omitted it shows a sort of fault message. How can it made to show a single date? Kraxler (talk) 15:17, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

185th New York State Legislature
←184th 186th→
The facade of the New York State Capitol building in bright daylight
New York State Capitol (2009)
Overview
Legislative bodyNew York State Legislature
JurisdictionNew York, United States
TermJanuary 1, 1983 – December 31, 1984
Senate
Members61
PresidentLt. Gov. Alfred DelBello (D)
Temporary PresidentWarren M. Anderson (R)
Party controlRepublican (35–26)
Assembly
Members150
SpeakerStanley Fink (D)
Party controlDemocratic
Sessions
1stJanuary 5 – June 28, 1983
2ndSeptember 15, 1983 –
3rdJanuary 4 – July 1, 1984
4thDecember 6, 1984 –
Because the {{Infobox New York Legislature}} has this:
{{#if:{{{sessionend2|}}}|&nbsp;– {{{sessionend2}}}}}
if |sessionend2= is empty or omitted, then don't render anything for that parameter. None of the other parameters are coded this way making |sessionendx= required parameters.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:30, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Yeah that was kind of lame so I took the liberty of making it possible for any or all of the 8 sessions be just 1 day long. Of course now the issue becomes the ability to "skip" over session-ends without getting a bang, but I prefer to trust in the contributor's diligence over the merely theoretical "trouble maker". -- George Orwell III (talk) 15:49, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Thank you very much for the explanation and the fix. Kraxler (talk) 16:07, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Watchlist an entire project

Is there a way to wildcard watchlist an entire project space, on or off wiki? This is with reference to the Signpost: we have to maintain an at this point vast collection of pages, many of them archival issues which should not be touched. It'd be helpful if we had a mechanism for doing so. ResMar 16:15, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: If all of the pages that you are interested in are in a single category, you can use the category expand feature of Special:Export: put the category name in the small "Add pages from category" box and click Add. The larger box will fill with page names. Click anywhere in that box, and then (Windows browsers) press Ctrl+A to select all, then Ctrl+C to copy. Then go to Special:EditWatchlist/raw, open up an empty line, and use Ctrl+V to paste, then click Update watchlist. If all of the pages that you are interested in are spread over several categories, you can do this for each individual category. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:18, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
 Redrose64: Tut. I've discovered the numerical limit of the watchlist—it'll only take me as far as March 2011. ResMar 22:42, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
@Resident Mario: You might be able to use Special:RecentChangesLinked – it is like a watchlist, but for pages in a specified category, or linked from a specified page, or linked to a specific page - Evad37 [talk] 23:17, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
 Evad37: The point appears to be moot—some change in 2012 appears to have stopped the archival process and so Signpost articles newer than 2011 are uncategorized. ResMar 23:22, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

rb element

I was doing some cleanup and found that the {{ruby}} template does not pass the W3C HTML validation. I get the error "Element rb not allowed as child of element ruby in this context." I have been poking at this and I just don't see the problem. Examples from the W3C site do not validate. I used the W3C validator and https://validator.nu/ which allows text entry: both give the same results. Here is the sample I used for testing:

Markup Renders as 
<ruby>
<rb>紙芝居</rb>
<rp>(</rp>
<rt>かみしばい</rt>
<rp>)</rp>
</ruby>

紙芝居 ( かみしばい )

I am starting to think the validator is at fault here, but I don't see any issues on their bug list. Thoughts? --  Gadget850 talk 02:03, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

  • The issue is with rb; not rp. <rb> is not part of the WHATWG living standard. See this bug. Alakzi (talk) 02:25, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Fixed discussion title. More reading... --  Gadget850 talk 02:27, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
      • The version with <rb> doesn't validate, but this does: <ruby>紙芝居<rt>かみしばい</rt></ruby>. Note: I haven't read the documentation, this is after the example of the output at wikt:講#Kanji. Another issue is that in Firefox 36 the rubies at Wiktionary display as small characters after the kanji. They display correctly as small characters above the kanji in Chrome. – Margin1522 (talk) 04:08, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
        • Display is a different issue, and is browser related. The HTML Ruby add-on for Firefox displays just fine. --  Gadget850 talk 08:38, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
        • so the question is what to use? I'd say we put the rb out as the WHATWG seems not to like it and the W3C says that it can be implied abd in the use case the ruby tpl is right now an implied use wouldnt make a problem.
My1 06:49, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Problem linking to articles with a closing paren - SOLVED

I'm trying to copy article links from my address line into a doc or pdf file, and consistently have errors only when the article title ends in a closing parenthesis:

Is this a known issue, and is there any way to create a working link in my file that goes to the correct article? I did notice somewhere that parentheses seem to be rendered as .28 and .29 (if I'm now remembering the numbers correctly), but substituting these by hand didn't work at all.

Thanks for any help. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:47, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Here's the place I had found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic#Years_of_crisis_.281919.E2.80.931923.29, which goes to Years of crisis (1919–1923). Milkunderwood (talk) 04:06, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
For that matter, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense that the parentheses at the end of a subsection title would encode properly, but not at the end of an article title.
FWIW I'm using Chrome 41 with Office 2013 on a 7 machine; but my files containing links will be for distribution to people with whatever setup they may have, so what I need is a general all-purpose solution. Milkunderwood (talk) 06:00, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
I'm feeling kind of stymied - maybe an experiment could help if someone wouldn't mind doing it. Just open any kind of blank document form, go to any article with the title ending in parentheses such as the three I listed here, copy your address line into your document, and see if it works, or truncates the title to remove the parenthetical part. I'd love to know if anyone can get to the correct article. Milkunderwood (talk) 09:02, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
Using Firefox 36.0.1 if I copy the addresss line and paste into Word 2007 I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_%28Leonardo_da_Vinci%29 and if ctrl-click that I get to the correct document with parentheses in the address bar. Generally, I don't remember problems with this sort of thing. Thincat (talk) 09:50, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
And with Chrome 41.0.2272.89 m copy/paste gives me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo_da_Vinci) which I have to convert to a link in Word (from Firefox the text pasted in autolinked). Ctrl-click works OK with the address bar showing brackets. All with Windows 7. Thincat (talk) 09:58, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
It's a common issue in external software like email programs and apparently Word that some characters need percent-encoding to be interpreted as part of a url. The typical problems are '(', ')', and url's ending with '.'. They encode as %28, %29 and %2E. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:39, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks very much for these suggestions. Manually substituting %28 for "(" and %29 for ")" works for me. I was thrown off by the full stops used in the "Years of crisis (1919-1923)" in place of the percent sign. Milkunderwood (talk) 18:24, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Full stops are used in anchors (the part after '#' to go to a specific place on a page). PrimeHunter (talk) 21:29, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Manual page move for protected page

A long discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Religion#Disambiguations of divinities has always unanimously opposed the disambiguation opposed disambiguation shown at pages such as Mars (mythology) on NPOV grounds in comparison to the religions of the living and the religions of the dead.

This page has no "more" menu so as to offer a move function and the tags (if that is the correct term): {{distinguish2|the planet [[Mars]]}} {{pp-move-indef}} {{Use mdy dates|date=May 2012}}

I understand that the reason for protection is to avoid confusion with Mars (planet) but the proposal it to move to Mars (deity).

I have tried a temporary removal of the tags but this did not work.

Thanks GregKaye 07:17, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

The page is move-protected, meaning only administrators can move it (the tags are only used to indicate the protection.) If there is consensus to move, you can ask for it on Wikipedia:Requested moves. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:07, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
Thank you Edokter for the help. There are likely just a handful of such protected articles also such as Gaia so I'll collect a list and make the request. GregKaye 13:26, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Need both user-script writers and bot writers for an initiative at the Signpost

Hello all, we at the Signpost are currently underway introducing technical archival architecture at the Signpost, and we're in need of talented people to develop the damn thing =). There are essentially two different things we're trying to do:

  • Story-tagging: Mr. Stradivarius has written and is still working on a module that tags stories in the Signpost archives according to a manually-generated list which I've put together on top of an automatic "greatest-hits" one. So for instance, if you hit {{#invoke:Signpost|tag|wikisym}} you will get:

{{#invoke:Signpost|tag|wikisym}}

We want to extend this system to every Signpost article to date, a massive task that'll require combing through more than a decade's worth of published material by volunteers. For the moment, however, I have presented what I hope will serve as the lynchpin of this effort, a proposed research hub of sorts, at User:Resident Mario/sandbox. The next steps are outlined in the To-do. Even populating this list is going to be a challenge and so we need a userscript that'll help us maintain the hub—adding things, deleting them, changing information, etc.

  • Historical linking: I've created a proof of concept in one of my other sandboxes but have not acted much further than that so far because at this point. This is a simple idea—an option to give readers links to articles as they appeared at publication time—that I think would be valuable to people going through old stories trying to get a picture of the "way things were". Introducing this into articles will require the work of a bot working together with the templates that the Signpost has used over time to integrate this feature into all of our articles.

Please help us! :) ResMar 17:12, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

I can have a go at writing the user script that updates the Lua module pages with new tags, etc. - it will be good practice for my JavaScript. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:37, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

IPA and Greek

Naked Browser displaying German phonology § Consonants.

I have a couple of issues with fonts on my mobile device (Motorola Moto X, Android 4.4).

First is that, in most browsers (specifically Chrome, Naked Browser, and both Operas), [x] (voiceless velar fricative, U+0078 LATIN SMALL LETTER X) and [χ] (voiceless uvular fricative, U+03C7 GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI) have identical glyph shapes. They're distinguishable in Firefox, which uses a different font. For displaying Greek, the glyph without descenders is fine (presumably; I don't know Greek) but is a problem for IPA, since they make some passages misleading or incomprehensible, as the example here shows.

The second is that letters with polytonic Greek diacritics just aren't displayed at all - again, except in Firefox. See for example Perispomenon. Much of that article's content is obliterated by the bad font.

None of this goes away by switching to the desktop site.

Is this fixable? Bear in mind that user CSS isn't an option since the mobile style sheet ignores it - and in any case I'd like this to be fixed for all users, not just me. Also I'm not aware of any way to install extra fonts on Android unless it happens to be a Samsung device. Hairy Dude (talk) 16:47, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Please file bugreuports with Google Android —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:41, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Done for the x / chi issue: Android issue 160613. Hairy Dude (talk) 03:49, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Aligning in "Template:fb" lists

Hello, I have an idea how to edit the template:flaglink/core in order to avoid the disorder in the first column, as you can see. So, what's your opinion?

Maiō T. (talk) 23:00, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Personally, I like your version (the sandbox) better. Mamyles (talk) 23:39, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
I like the sandbox version slightly better when countries are lined up in a column, but not when they are alone. Example from UEFA Euro 2016 qualifying Group E#Slovenia v Switzerland with {{fb}}:
Slovenia 1–0  Switzerland
Novaković 79' (pen.) Report
Attendance: 8,500
With {{fb/sandbox}}:
Slovenia 1–0 Switzerland
Novaković 79' (pen.) Report
Attendance: 8,500
I don't support alignment as default when there is often nothing to align and you just get an unnecessary gap. An optional alignment would be OK. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:12, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
How about when the flags are centered? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 09:07, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
I agree with PrimeHunter; that is why I decided to create {{flaglist}} (which Maio's test for the sports templates is based on) as a separate template instead of changing {{flag}}. In this case, we could create separate "..list" templates for each of the hundreds of sports templates, or make the alignment optional by means of a parameter:
SiBr4 (talk) 09:58, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
I agree with PrimeHunter, too. I propose to edit the 'flaglink/core' lines and add the optional alignment ...
| flaglink/core{{yesno|{{{align}}}|no=}}
... in following team-sports templates:
bb, bbw, bd, bk, bku, bkw, bkwu, davis, fb, fbu, fbw, fbwu, fed, fhm, fhw, fl, flw, hb, hbj, hbw, hbwj, ih, ih18, ihj, ihw, ihw18, iih, iihw, ru, ruu, ruw, ru7, ru7w, sb, sbw, vb, vbw, wp, wpw
To Edokter: That's absolutely perfect !!! Now just replace Template:Flaglink/core with its sandbox version.
To SiBr4: There are the hundreds of sports templates, but just these 40 are team sports. I can edit them (except tl:fb – it's protected)
Maiō T. (talk) 15:32, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Done. It would be a good default in lists though. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:55, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
I've reverted – with that change it always aligns, without any parameter switch. What should be done is moving the sandbox to a different title, and changing the sports templates ({{fb}} etc.) to include a switch between that and the current {{flaglink/core}} (see {{fb/sandbox}}). SiBr4 (talk) 16:01, 14 March 2015 (UTC)


I don't know much about CSS. Would it be possible to add something like <div class="alignedicons">...</div> around content with flag icons in a column, and then put something in a central flag template and MediaWiki:Common.css which causes alignment without having to add a parameter to each template and each call of that template? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:16, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

That would be possible using something like 
.alignedicons .flagicon {display:inline-block;width:30px;}
However, using a CSS stylesheet, the block width cannot vary with the icon size, like it does in the {{flaglist}} template. So a CSS class would only be useful for icon sizes close to the default size. SiBr4 (talk) 17:47, 14 March 2015 (UTC)


@SiBr4: I've added switch to tl:fb/sandbox. Now it works fine. Please simplify the code. (The new template could have a title: Template:flaglink/align).
Maiō T. (talk) 19:07, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

The previous version of the sandbox already had a switch; in fact it did exactly the same thing the current version does, but without duplicating the entire code.
I created a new template at Template:Flaglink/aligned, with the contents from {{Flaglink/core/sandbox}}. SiBr4 (talk) 19:18, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
@SiBr4: Please remove this code ...
{{#ifeq:{{{size}}}|20x16px|&nbsp;}}{{#ifeq:{{{alias}}}|Nepal|&nbsp;&nbsp;}}
... from Template:Flaglink/core. From now it's unnecessary – see those "alignings" through adding of NBSPs.
Maiō T. (talk) 20:41, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
It may be better to first change lists to use the align parameter before removing the "pseudo-alignment" from /core ({{flag/core}} also still includes it). I added the parameter to {{fb}}; I could run AWB to quickly change all flag templates, but would advise getting some more input before doing any mass changes. SiBr4 (talk) 13:03, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
SiBr4 we have a problem. Aligned icons are 1 px wider than the default ones. (Or, better said, spaces are 1 px wider.)
 France (default)
 Monaco (aligned)
 Belgium (default)
 Niger (aligned)
 England (default)
 England (aligned)
Maiō T. (talk) 16:16, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
When aligned, the width of the icon with spacing is fixed at 30px by default. Without the align option, the maximum width at default size is 25px (a 23px image with a 1px border on both sides), plus a non-breaking space (the width of which probably varies with the font used by the reader). I don't think that is a problem, since aligned and non-aligned icons wouldn't be used together. If it really is, I can change the aligning box with to be a pixel less. SiBr4 (talk) 16:33, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

SiBr4 –
1) I thought, the NBSP is always 4 px wide. This will never work. You could change 30px to 29, but it will do a mess to other users.
I would like to use aligned and non-aligned icons together, with aligning only for Switzerland and other squarish flags - see 2015 Men's World Ice Hockey Championships#Championship.
2) Back to my contribution from 20:41, 14 March 2015. The first half of the code – {{#ifeq:{{{size}}}|20x16px|&nbsp;}} – is absolutely unnecessary, because flagicons with 16px height don't exist. And the second half – {{#ifeq:{{{alias}}}|Nepal|&nbsp;&nbsp;}} – is about Nepal and those two strange NBSPs.

Maiō T. (talk) 18:50, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

  1. The spaces in the following tests use different fonts:
    • Qatar Qatar (serif)
    • Qatar Qatar (sans-serif)
    • Qatar Qatar (monospace)
    The width of a space obviously also changes with the font size. So it is certainly not a fixed number of pixels. I'm not sure what you refer to with "this will never work".

    I'd suggest just using |align=yes for every entry, if only for consistency. The alignment option should only not be used if there is no need for any alignment; it makes no sense to force non-aligned icons to be aligned with aligned ones. The minimum aspect ratio for a flag icon to be the full 23px wide is 23/15≈1.533, so actually most national flags would require the align parameter in a list (including all 2:3 flags, i.e. France, Russia etc.). If there is enough agreement to do so, aligning could be made the default, so that only flag icons outside of lists need to be marked.

  2. The 20x16px check not doing anything was my fault; I changed the default size in {{Country data Switzerland}} and {{Country data Vatican City}} from 20x16px to 23x16px back in August, and updated {{flag/core}} but not {{flaglink/core}}. I still think that the extra spaces for (less-than-)square flags shouldn't be removed before the align parameter is at least added to all templates. SiBr4 (talk) 20:40, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
@SiBr4:
1.a) Almost every flag in template:flaglink uses 29px field (including borders and nbsp), so, let's change those 30px to 29px in Module:Flaglist/size, maybe it will work after all.
1.b) Okay, I can use |align=yes for every entry.
1.c) I don't recommend to do "align=yes" as default; flagicons outside of lists are used more often.
1.d) Now it's necessary to update 40 team-sports templates (see the list above – 15:32, 14 March 2015) but don't we need a permission, or something?
Maiō T. (talk) 22:48, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
The longest flags in your non-aligned list at the start of this section (France, Belgium, Russia and Portugal) are actually 30 rather than 29 pixels for me. The non-aligned width is inherently different for everyone, so I don't think there is much point in adapting the aligned width to it.
There are more team sports flag templates than those forty; I found about fifty more that use {{Flaglink/core}} and are categorized in Category:Flag template system, for example {{bandy}}, {{rl}} and {{af}}. You could ask/notify WT:SPORTS about the proposed changes. SiBr4 (talk) 21:31, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Signalling character limit in edit summaries

Currently the edit summary is limited to roughly 250 characters. Per Help:Edit_summary#Edit_summary_properties_and_features, "If you attempt to type or paste more, only the first 250 characters will be displayed – the rest will be discarded. For example attempting to add 10 new characters (at the end or in between) to a summary already containing 245 characters will result in the first 5 new characters being inserted and the second 5 being disregarded". In practice this means ellipsis instead of whole phrase, for example, "restoring neutral v..." instead of "restoring neutral version", while an edit summary before saving displays all characters properly. Since many contributors may not be aware of that or may simply forget this, I think some kind of prevention is warranted (also because in practice you have to calculate the characters via some application each time you write a relatively detailed edit summary).

One of the solutions is simply prevention of further typing by cursor when the character limit is reached, with possible notification reading something like "You have reached your character limit" (similar to that appearing after an edit was saved). Another way is increasing character limit to allow more detailed rationales, although then signalling character limit may also be appropriate. Brandmeistertalk 13:02, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

I can only type the 255 allowed characters but in some cases like page moves where an automatic edit summary is added in front, it may cut off what I typed. What is your browser and does it allow you to type more than 255? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:42, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
I use the latest Firefox. Recently I've reached the character limit during a page move and the edit summary was cut down by ellipsis. I recall having a couple of such cases in the past and saw them in other edit summaries. From what I see the automatic edit summaries are also affected by character limitation, also when undoing and reverting page versions, so currently one has to delete them to make room for his/her own edit summary. Automatic page move summaries seem to be particularly vulnerable, since they are longer, in the form of "User:Foo moved page Foo to Foo2") Brandmeistertalk 14:29, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Normal edits appear to have exactly what you are requesting, I can't type more than the edit summary limit in the edit summary box. Page moves may be an issue though it seems. Sam Walton (talk) 14:41, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Indeed (I'm also allowed to type 255 by default). However, the problem persists in automatic edit summaries followed by user's own edit summaries, like here, and also during reverts. But unlike reverts, you can't remove automatic page move summary to make room for your own. Note that section headings in the summaries (including /* top */ sections) are also counted, unless removed. Brandmeistertalk 15:03, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
I can type 200 characters in the page move "Reason" box, independent of the length of the page name. The whole typed summary is preserved in the move log like [44] but elsewhere like page histories [45] the total summary including the automatic part can only be 255 characters and the user part may be cut off. Really long pagenames will also cut off the automatic part when it reaches 255, and display nothing from the user. If an ordinary edit displays something automatic in the edit summary box like a section edit or undo then nothing is cut off. The user can just type less than 255 characters after the automatic part, but gets the full 255 if the automatic part is removed. The problem with some log actions also being registered in page histories with an automatic part may be hard to solve in a friendly way. There is probably a good reason for a 255 total limit in page histories, including whatever some feature may add automatically. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:00, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I remember seeing the links to move log in page histories a couple of years ago, but now the accessibility isn't the same it used to be. Brandmeistertalk 17:48, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
The top of page histories say "View logs for this page". It must be clicked to find out whether there actually are any logs. The top of user contributions has "logs". PrimeHunter (talk) 18:23, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Original problem will still be valid but might appear less often once phab:T6715 (Allow comments to have 767 instead of 255 bytes) is "fully" fixed and deployed. It is being worked on. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 07:43, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Bulleted list strangeness in ship infoboxes

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T19486

See Template:Infobox ship characteristics/testcases. Ship infoboxes are made from a table that contains (usually) three and sometimes more individual templates each of which provide the necessary html table markup. As can be seen at the testcases page, an odd thing happens when a template parameter contains a bulleted list; in this case |Ship armament= though the problem is not restricted to this parameter alone.

I had thought that recent changes in the template might have caused this problem but now I think not. The sandbox version at the testcases page predates the recent changes and exhibits the same problem in the same way.

If I wrap bulleted lists in {{plainlist}} then the infoboxes render correctly.

Looking at the html source we can see that following the bulleted list the table is terminated and a new table started:

html output of infobox

<h2><table class="infobox" style="width:315px;float:right;clear:right;border-spacing:2px;font-size:90%">
<tr>
<th colspan="2" height="30" style="background-color:#B0C4DE;text-align:center;vertical-align:middle;font-size:110%">General characteristics</th>
</tr>
<tr style="vertical-align:top;">
<td>Armament:</td>
<td>
<p>100 guns:</p>
<ul>
<li>Lower deck: 28 × 42 or 32-pounders</li>
<li>Middle deck: 28 × 24-pounders</li>
<li>Upper deck: 28 × 12-pounders</li>
<li>Quarter deck: 12 × 6-pounders</li>
<li>Forecastle: 4 × 6-pounders</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table>
<tr>
<th colspan="2" height="30" style="background-color:#B0C4DE;text-align:center;vertical-align:middle;font-size:110%">General characteristics</th>
</tr>
<tr style="vertical-align:top;">
<td>Armament:</td>
<td>
<p>100 guns:</p>
<ul>
<li>Lower deck: 28 × 42 or 32-pounders</li>
<li>Middle deck: 28 × 24-pounders</li>
<li>Upper deck: 28 × 12-pounders</li>
<li>Quarter deck: 12 × 6-pounders</li>
<li>Forecastle: 4 × 6-pounders</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table>
<tr>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>

While not visually apparent, the problem exists when the template containing a bulleted list is the only template in the infobox.

html output of infobox – one template with a bulleted list

<table class="infobox" style="width:315px;float:right;clear:right;border-spacing:2px;font-size:90%">
<tr>
<th colspan="2" height="30" style="background-color:#B0C4DE;text-align:center;vertical-align:middle;font-size:110%">General characteristics</th>
</tr>
<tr style="vertical-align:top;">
<td>Armament:</td>
<td>100 guns:
<ul>
<li>Lower deck: 28 × 42 or 32-pounders</li>
<li>Middle deck: 28 × 24-pounders</li>
<li>Upper deck: 28 × 12-pounders</li>
<li>Quarter deck: 12 × 6-pounders</li>
<li>Forecastle: 4 × 6-pounders</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table>
<tr>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>

Are the bulleted lists being correctly handled by code downstream from the template? If so, what changes do I need to make to the template in order to allow bulleted lists in the various ship infobox templates?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:38, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Please state the perceived problem and your browser, and don't just say "an odd thing happens". PrimeHunter (talk) 13:45, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
The infobox should, as infoboxes generally do, float right and not be, as I and others have seen, split into the normal right-floated portion and a left-floated portion. Do you not see that condition at Template:Infobox ship characteristics/testcases? Current versions of Chrome and Opera and even a very old version of MSIE all exhibit the same problem in exactly the same way.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:19, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

I never use these ship templates and didn't know what to expect from them but I see what you mean. I get the impression there is a deeper problem which is not about bulleted lists, but their presence in your example causes a visible effect. It looks like there is a problem with mixing html code and wikitext for tables.

I have tried to construct a simple example. 

Pure wiki syntax:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
|Row 1
|}

Pure html:
<table class="wikitable">
<tr><td>Row 1</td></tr>
</table>

Mixed syntax:
{| class="wikitable"
<tr><td>Row 1</td></tr>
|}

Mixed syntax for single row tables:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
<td>Row 1</td>
|}

The above produces:

Pure wiki syntax:

Row 1

Pure html:

Row 1

Mixed syntax:

Row 1

Something is inserting extra code in the mixed case which has a second row with no content. If html tidy or something thinks there is illegal table code then automated attempts to fix it may have very varying effects in different contexts. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:05, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Entering {{Infobox ship characteristics/testcases}} at Special:ExpandTemplates does not show the problem at Template:Infobox ship characteristics/testcases, but entering my above example at Special:ExpandTemplates does show the same problem as above. I don't know what that means. Maybe ExpandTemplates doesn't run everything that a saved edit runs, and this has "very varying effects in different contexts" as I vaguely put it above. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:24, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
Really starting to think wiki mark-up is the root of all evil....

Mixed syntax for single row tables :

Row 1

See this diff; Why it worked in stopping that extra empty table generation? Haven't a clue (never mind that entire family of templates need to go "all html" or go home:( ) -- George Orwell III (talk) 17:37, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Admittedly, that does make more sense now that I realize the finished product was intentionally suppose to be in series and not parallel box renderings.... but the truth is most of the solutions for the current batch of html table based templates need to go all-div, all-css3 sooner rather than later. I wonder if developers are even considering switching the table mark up at some point in the future to use a Div based scheme that still behaves like the current table/row/cells stuff does now but without all the "drama" that comes with it. -- George Orwell III (talk) 18:39, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
I agree that these ought to be superseded; modular {{Infobox}}es would work—comparatively—well. Farther down the line, infoboxes should probably be made to use definition lists. Alakzi (talk) 18:55, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

It now seems the problem in my earlier example and the ship templates have different causes, or at least are caused by different examples of mixing wikitext and html. I made a small example of the apparent ship problem. 

Broken (does not display Row 1 and Row 2 in the same table):
<table border="1">
<tr><td>
*Row 1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Row 2</td></tr>
</table>

Asterisk removed from broken version:
<table border="1">
<tr><td>
Row 1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Row 2</td></tr>
</table>

Newline removed from broken version:
<table border="1">
<tr><td>
*Row 1</td></tr><tr><td>Row 2</td></tr>
</table>

Newline added to broken version:
<table border="1">
<tr><td>
*Row 1</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>Row 2</td></tr>
</table>

Asterisk replaced by html list syntax in broken version:
<table border="1">
<tr><td>
<li>Row 1</li></td></tr>
<tr><td>Row 2</td></tr>
</table>

The above produces:

Broken (does not display Row 1 and Row 2 in the same table):

  • Row 1
Row 2

Asterisk removed from broken version:

Row 1
Row 2

Newline removed from broken version:

  • Row 1
Row 2

Newline added to broken version:

  • Row 1
Row 2

Asterisk replaced by html list syntax in broken version:

  • Row 1
    • Row 2

    Each of the four changes fixes the problem. So if a table has an asterisk causing a list and uses </tr> on the same source line to end the row then the following <tr> must also be on that line to become part of the same table. Or something like that. It's messy. All five versions make a single table at Special:ExpandTemplates, but the last displays the bullet to the left of the table for me where it's inside the table above. If I save it in a html file on my PC and view it without MediaWiki then the bullet is inside the table. The first four versions don't make bullets in a html file since the asterisk is not html. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:49, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

    Row 2
    • Row 1
    Broken "works" when Row 2 is swapped for Row 1 btw
    Bet$ anyone? My money is on sub-par(?) handling of nuanced table elements like TBODY by the 'BOT behind the curtain' ("always there"? in the table accounting; nothing more than just some text <tbody> in our case). Some interesting reading there but.... ???

    Seriously, you can drive yourself nuts trying make rhyme or reason out of 'why some things "behave" the way they do' around here. -- George Orwell III (talk) 23:27, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

    Though the parser escapes <tbody>, it is inserted in all tables by the "linter". Something in the linter is what's probably causing this mess. Alakzi (talk) 23:43, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
    I was already driving myself nuts trying to figure out which wiki code breaks it, let alone why. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:05, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    One of you good folks would know better than I as to what's behind this. Still I'd like to shamelessly cast doubt on $paragraphStack without any basis nor support in spite of my shortcomings.

    why BR is ever tapped to -- in effect -- deal with 'one too many detected' opening P tags just doesn't sit well with me. Why not nullify it with a closing P tag if in doubt? or just keep blindly inserting </P><P> pairs if there is any other remaining doubt that content immediately follows that (?)detected opening tag? (its kind of late in the game for curtailing the number of 'run on' sentences accidently rendered on WP if I do say so myself :). Weird. And frustrating not being fluent enough to stop throwing it under the bus just on a whim. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:35, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

    This is a known issue, see T19486. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:25, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    I think that it would be better to just re-write the {{infobox ship}} (and related templates) from scratch. These old, odd templates have developed quite a few small problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:35, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    Infobox help

    I've run into two infoboxes that have problems I don't know how to fix and I'd be grateful for help from some more template literate editors. The problems are explained at the links.

    Thank you.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  18:37, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

    Both have been fixed by John of Reading. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:24, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thank you @John of Reading: and done elegantly too. Just another reason to believe that people can work together to make a great thing like Wikipedia.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  03:30, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    Preview button on file upload

    The upload form on Commons contains a preview button at the bottom. The local upload form does not contain any preview button. Why is there no preview button on this project, and is there a way to add one? --Stefan2 (talk) 00:25, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

    See commons:MediaWiki:UploadForm.js/Documentation. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:50, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    When I made my earliest uploads at Commons, I normally used the "Preview" feature, but soon discovered a bug: any categories that you had added using the "Categories" selector (just below the "Licensing" drop-down) would be lost on using Preview, and had to be re-added before clicking Upload file. I don't know if this bug is still there. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:04, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

    Hi,

    I'm trying to fix links going to the page TRS-80, which was recently split. Content not specific to the original TRS-80 architecture has either been moved to List of TRS-80 and Tandy-branded computers, or in some cases to its own article (e.g. TRS-80 Model II).

    However, I'm sure there are still many links pointing *directly* to subsections in the original article, e.g. TRS-80#modelii (which was formerly where the Model II was covered, but isn't any more).

    Ideally, I'd be able to see whether a link to TRS-80 was a subsection link, and the context (e.g. the piped link text and possible surrounding text), so I can determine if it should be moved. "what links here" only shows articles that link to TRS-80, not showing whether they're subsection links, nor the context- and that's a long line to manually check in this case. I'm not sure that the Navigation Popups gadget is useful here either.

    Also, as a general principle, is it preferable to link via a redirect (e.g. [[TRS-80 Model 16]]) instead of a subsection link (e.g. [[TRS-80_Model_II#model16|TRS-80 Model 16]]), since the latter is far more maintainable and less likely to break if (e.g.) TRS-80 Model 16 gets moved to its own article (which it *might* do)?

    Thanks for any feedback, Ubcule (talk) 15:29, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

    @Ubcule: Oh, I can still hear the floppy drive of my 32k Model III and its daisy wheel printer. Here's a list of articles that contain a link to a section on TRS-80, from the March 4 database dump:
    You've fixed some of these articles since the dump was created. Hope this helps! GoingBatty (talk) 21:12, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    That was very useful thanks- I've fixed all the links in the articles above where relevant.
    I take it that finding that out wouldn't have been easy without looking at the database itself, though? It seems as if it would be quite useful functionality to have in general.
    Once again, thanks for the help! Ubcule (talk) 01:01, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

    Green and blue bullets

    First time posting at the Village Pump, so I may need to be directed to a more appropriate place. Meanwhile, my issue.

    Recently, the size of the blue bullets used all over WP was changed from the long-standing size proportional to the default font to a (very small) pin-dot bullet; this morning, the green bullets have also changed to this new, tiny size. This makes them extremely difficult to see, and it is impossible to differentiate the blue from the green on a watch list. Their size is far too small for screen readers or other readers with low vision, making the site systemically out of 508 compliance. I can't see them well wearing the ordinary glasses I use to read my computer screen, and I'm a long way from visually impaired. I recall no opportunity to discuss this, and have no idea where to express my displeasure with this change, which now has made the color coding system on my watch list useless. If there is a discussion where I should take this concern, please direct me and close this, otherwise, what has to be done to open a dialogue about restoring the original bullet size? --Drmargi (talk) 15:36, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

    It was recently discussed here (Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 135#Bullet points) but it doesn't appear that anything was determined from that discussion. I'll note that in Monobook with Firefox 36 my bullets are normal sized. -Niceguyedc Go Huskies! 15:54, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks! I read to the discussion, which was basically a lot of faffing about whose browser did what, but no solution to the problem. I know less than nothing about Monobook and the like; I use Safari for OS 10.8, and I have a ADA/508 non-compliant website. It has to be fixed. What's the best next move? --Drmargi (talk) 18:53, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    The core of the problem is a bug in WebKit, which miscalculates the size of SVG images when used in list-style-image (the CSS property that assigns the bullet icon). Short of not using an SVG, the only solution is to wait until Apple has fixed the problem. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:13, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Drmargi: Try this: add the code in this diff to your common.css file. It provides nice big visible green stars beside each unexamined watch-list item. -- Diannaa (talk) 03:16, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    Tech News: 2015-12

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

    Recent changes

    • The servers that resize images are using new software. You should report new problems that you notice with images. [46]
    • You can now see lists of bugs about Commons, Wikisource and Wiktionary. [47]
    • It is now easier to add special characters in VisualEditor. You can edit the list of characters for your wiki. [48] [49]

    Problems

    • Wikis were broken for a few minutes on Thursday due to a code error.

    Changes this week

    • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 18 (calendar).
    • A puzzle piece icon (icon) now shows hidden templates in VisualEditor. You can edit the template by clicking the icon. For example, you can now edit anchor templates. [50] [51]
    • You can now add examples, and details about old parameters, in TemplateData. [52] [53]

    Meetings

    • You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
    • You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 18 at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.

    Future changes

    • The list of bad user names on your wiki will no longer work. The global list will replace it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [54] [55]
    • You can comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [56]
    • The final steps of single user login (SUL) will happen in April. You can see the rules to rename accounts. [57]

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

    15:16, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

    Can there be a technical fix to stop IPs using ban templates?

    I spotted (and blocked) an IP today who was using Template:Banned user ([58]) and Template:Indefblocked-global ([59]) to harass another editor (who is in good standing). I was surprised to see that it's possible for an IP account to apply these templates without a bot or similar reverting them given that there's virtually no circumstances were it would be appropriate for an unregistered account to use them. Is it possible to implement a technical fix for this? Nick-D (talk) 09:54, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

    Special:AbuseFilter. — Keφr 12:07, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    • I'm not sure it would be appropriate to implement an WP:EF for this. I know that the foundation has been known in the past to apply those templates to user pages of users legitimately banned by legal. I know they recently created a new account for this, and I'm not sure what their position is on it in the future. If such an EF was implemented, it would have to be careful to not block foundation IPs doing legitimate work. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 12:41, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks for the advice all, I've requested a filter at Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested#Filter to stop IPs using ban templates Nick-D (talk) 09:53, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    How to Download Flash Video and Convert to OGG

    There's an excellent Fed-gov't public-domain video ([60]) on a plane crash that would be great to have on the relevant article as a supplementary media file, but I'm not sure how to download the flash format and convert that to a Wiki-accepted OGG file. Can anyone help? -- Veggies (talk) 15:16, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

    To editor Veggies: This seems to be an animation rather than a simple video, so I don't think it can be converted without resorting to screen capturing. Anon124 (+2) (notify me of responses! / talk / contribs) 17:14, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
    Is there a freeware program for that? I'm not tech-knowledge savvy. -- Veggies (talk) 18:48, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Veggies: That is indeed an excellent video. If you have Firefox, you can download it by right clicking the page and selecting View Page Info | Media | (file name) | Save As... Or you can right click (this link) and select "Save Link As...". That will download the SWF Flash file to your computer, and you can drag it to your browser to view it. The problem is converting from the SWF format to the WebM or OGG format. I tried a couple of free online SWF to WebM converters, but they failed with errors. We have a help page at Wikipedia:Creation and usage of media files but it is technical and kind of dated. Perhaps someone here will have more experience in converting SWF files. – Margin1522 (talk) 16:42, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    One more thought about Anon124's comment. An animation is a set of commands, not image data. To convert that, a conversion program would need the ability to emulate the Flash player executing the commands, and that might be beyond their capabilities. That would explain the conversion errors. – Margin1522 (talk) 17:17, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    I need some help with this box

    column is 100 points wide column is 200 points wide column is 200 points wide dat 300 points dat2 100 pt dat3 100 pt dat4 100 pt dat5 100 pt
    blah blih bluh hey rey day herr murr
    messo

    I plan to use this to describe TV-series (it have some similarities with episode-guide)

    I would like the last column (where it is written "messo") to go to the end ->. I with to write plot summary in this section while the upper ones are for title, year of release etc. Can someone give me some advice on how to make this column go to the end? --Ezzex (talk) 17:53, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

    Use the colspan= attribute. We do have ready made templates for this though, like {{episode list}}. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:02, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
    I don't know how to put this into the system--Ezzex (talk) 18:30, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
    I would also like to put in some color in the top columns.--Ezzex (talk) 19:51, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
    Read the documentation I linked to on how to use it. I think you're trying to re-invent the wheel. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:08, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks. I wonder if you could put some color in the top columns?--Ezzex (talk) 12:46, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    Mohamed Nasheed

    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T88478

    Is my computer possessed or is there a reason that whenever I try to lead the Mohamed Nasheed page, my browser gets an error? Connormah (talk) 02:33, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    @Connormah: I have no problem using Firefox 36.0.1. What browser are you using, and what error are you getting? Do you get the same error when you view other articles? GoingBatty (talk) 02:59, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    I am getting an "Aw, snap!" error when I try to load it in Chrome, but can view it using Safari. I've had several of these pageload fails whilst using Chrome in the past few weeks. -- Diannaa (talk) 03:07, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    Yup, it's Chrome. So far the only page that does this. It just does not seem to want to load. Connormah (talk) 04:18, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    A frustrating known issue, see the phab report and Chromium issue. — MusikAnimal talk 05:54, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    Hmm, I don't have any problems loading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Nasheed in Google Chrome 41 on Fedora 21. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 20:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    As far as I know it's 100% a bug with Chrome, and evidently just certain platforms/versions (I'm running Chrome 41 on Mac), but they are aware of it. I believe it's already been fixed and pending deployment, as the aforementioned page (or any other page with similar characters) seems to load fine on Canary, which is the bleeding-edge Chrome release. — MusikAnimal talk 20:29, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    I noticed in the past couple days an icon pops up when you hover near a section that lets you click on it and it shows the link in the URL bar. For me, it's incredibly distracting and I can't ever see needing it (and if I did, there's still the ToC). So any way to disable it? A setting I missed, or some java script? ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 17:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    See Help:DSL. --  Gadget850 talk 17:24, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 17:35, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    As an aside, I only just now realized that those icons are links to the section rather than merely decorative. Dragons flight (talk) 17:57, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    This feature was implemented by a volunteer developer and merged as part of routine code review. Due to adverse impact on Wikipedia's appearance in search results and other negative effects discussed in this task, it has been reverted. We (Wikimedia Foundation) have no plans to re-enable this feature without additional user research, design, testing and validation. If you have any questions or concerns, the best place to comment is phab:T18691 (cf. etiquette for Phabricator discussions).--Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 04:42, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

    TFD re template:Maintained

    Please see WP:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2015_March_16#Template:Maintained. 04:37, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

    Family tree template problem

    Hi. There seems to be a problem in the way that the Family tree template it is displayed. An extra line appear at the bottom right of some boxes. Error picture, or an other exemple is here. Can someone fix it, please. Daduxing (talk) 13:27, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

    The local Xia dynasty example renders without the line overflows just fine here (Win 8.1 & IE 11).

    Could it be the 2011 script you're importing via your Vector.js file that is somehow causing this for you? -- George Orwell III (talk) 13:51, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

    I don't thik so. I have logged out and then i checked from the laptop and is displaying the same way on both cases. Here is a picture with Xia tree with the lines in red circle (Xia exemple). The problem was also mentioned by someone else. I don't think that the problem is from my account/PC Daduxing (talk) 14:10, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
    Update: It is displaying well in Internet Explorer 9. Could be a Firefox problem??... Daduxing (talk) 14:14, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
    It is displaying fine in Chrome, as well. I do not have Firefox to test. Please use a different example hosting service - that one seems to be broken. Mamyles (talk) 14:23, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
    Other hosting service: Exemple 1 ; Exemple 2 --Daduxing (talk) 14:47, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
    Why does the hosting service need to be third-party - is there any reason that a Wikipedia screenshot is unsuitable? --Redrose64 (talk) 15:40, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
    Done it. I didn't know that I can use wikipedia image upload for this kind of files --Daduxing (talk) 16:01, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

    This appears to be an issue with the combination of border-collapse and colspan in Firefox. Alakzi (talk) 16:10, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

    I cannot reproduce on Firefox 36. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:55, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
    I've fixed it. Alakzi (talk) 11:46, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

    {{family tree}} is deprecated. Use {{chart}} instead. The latter's usage is almost exactly the same barring a few minor documented differences. Jason Quinn (talk) 19:56, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

    Email throttle

    Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

    Non-admin coordinators of The Wikipedia Library have been encountering issues with email rate limits - we often need to send multiples emails at a time, sometimes 30 or more. Since the account creator toolset currently includes an exemption from rate limits, granting that right to this small group of editors would be one means of overcoming this problem. Would this be feasible? If not, does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this problem? Nikkimaria (talk) 18:02, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    Has there historically been a widespread problem of users spamming others using the Wikipedia email function? If not, why does this limit exist? Without proof of a necessary cap being imposed, I'd rather raise the limit instead of granting more rights to individual users. Killiondude (talk) 20:12, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    There have definitely been instances of new users spamming; the only instances involving autoconfirmed users that I am aware of have involved research studies (example), though there may have been others. Nikkimaria (talk) 20:38, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    I think this question is better addressed at WP:VPT because it concerns the best way for certain non-admin individuals to be exempt from email throttling. Whether email has even been abused (yes) is a distraction. If the technical answer requires some change to policy, perhaps continue here, but I would have thought that if it were possible for a switch to be thrown someone could be found to do that in the case you describe. Johnuniq (talk) 22:57, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    There is no question about abuse in the past. I would like to know to if there has been widespread misuse. We deal with isolated incidents of misuse by blocking users. It would be nice to see the autoconfirmed users have an increased rate of emailing since I believe this issue has popped up before. But xaosflux's solution seems reasonable, as well. Killiondude (talk) 18:28, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
    Okay, what rate of emailing would you consider to be reasonable, and how do we actually go about changing that? I think a bot might be a bit harder to manage, although that could be just because I'm not too familiar with bot operation. Nikkimaria (talk) 21:54, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
    Possibly to prevent forking you could get a bot (WP:BOTREQ) to it for you, you could also create a bot account that is just used manually for it (e.g. User:TWL Mailer bot or similar. It also appears that several of your coordinators are admin, who already have noratelimit. If you want to discuss more technical options lets move this to VPT. — xaosflux Talk 01:44, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
    Okay, moving to VPT as suggested. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:40, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
    WP:IAR, just grant the ACC userright. ACC isn't really meant for this purpose, but it would resolve the problem and improve the encyclopedia without hurting anything. It's quicker and simpler than filing a bot request, and it has far less policy restrictions than bots. Granting the bot flag would be weird for a manually used account, while nobody would think oddly of ACC for a human. Nyttend (talk) 13:18, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    I agree - there is no downside to granting account creator to trusted editors. I'm not even sure IAR is necessary, just have them apply for account creator via the normal process, with email throttling as the justification. Admins that specialize in that area could impose conditions, such as requiring such users not to participate in the request an account process, but likely won't flat-out deny the request. Mamyles (talk) 15:27, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    Chronology

    Is there any way to search for Wikipedia articles by time and date of creation?Mcleod Allen Mueller Hill, aka Ohyeahstormtroopers6, Imperator Universi 23:57, 18 March 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ohyeahstormtroopers6 (talk • contribs)

    So basically you want a way to look for pages created, say, between 14:22 on 1 January 2015 and 23:14 on 4 January 2015? Special:Newpages works for this purpose, but it's only for recent creations; I don't know of anything that works on a longer-term basis. Nyttend (talk) 14:23, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Ohyeahstormtroopers6: Is this for all users, or one specific user? --Redrose64 (talk) 19:55, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    Redrose has a good point. It's easy to get a list of all pages created by any specific user: just go to contributions and check the boxes. In your case, Special:Contributions/Ohyeahstormtroopers6 and then click "Only show edits that are page creations", and then pick "Search". This will give a chronological list of all pages you've created. I'm unaware of any feature that does this for more than one user. Nyttend (talk) 01:06, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    SUL finalization rename notices going out

    Cross-posting to a few places

    I'm sending out messages to the user accounts here who may be potentially renamed. A great number of these accounts likely just need to log in and visit Special:MergeAccount to make sure they are attached to the right global account and avoid renaming. Also, users who have been renamed may be contacted about their old name being up for renaming. These users are free to ignore the message if they're fine abandoning their old account. We're well over half way in notifying users and my meta talk page exploded along with my inbox, I anticipate this likely happening here. Any extra eyes on my talk page will be greatly appreciated in case I get caught up answering emails first. Thanks, all. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    I just noted on a page I edited (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) that references no longer contain backlinks to the text that uses them. Is this a bug, or a new feature? (If it's a feature, count me as one who doesn't like!). I'm using IE9 with the MonoBook skin. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 17:01, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    The links appear to be present for me on that page with both Vector and Monobook on Chrome. I don't use IE so I can't test that, but if you still see a problem, you might try looking with a different browser and/or skin to see if you can nail down when the issue occurs for you. You could also try looking at the page while logged-out. Dragons flight (talk) 17:21, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    The "Near this page" beta feature caused this, but I no longer see it as an option. Try bypass your cache. --  Gadget850 talk 17:35, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    Switching to Vector skin doesn't help. Nor does clearing the cache. I don't have access to another browser at the moment. I'll try again when I'm at my home computer. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 17:56, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    What do you have selected at Preferences → Beta features? --  Gadget850 talk 21:31, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    Nothing. And none of the selections available would appear to affect this feature. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 12:12, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
    how about when you are logged out? --  Gadget850 talk 13:36, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

    Not there when I'm logged out, but interestingly, when I logged back in, having been on a page already, I was returned to that page after login, and the backlinks appeared briefly before disappearing. Something in the CSS is doing it, but I couldn't say what, and it's present both in the default (logged out) CSS as well as the MonoBook CSS. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 14:55, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

    Do you see text from here—Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.—to here? --  Gadget850 talk 21:06, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
    This appears to be an IE9 issue. Things look fine here on my home PC using Firefox. @Gadget850: I'll have to check whether I can see that text tomorrow when I'm back at my office PC. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 03:46, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    Now back on my work PC, the "mw-cite-backlink" class appears invisible. Gotta love non-standards-compliant IE9!!! WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 12:06, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    Works for me in IE11. I need to install a VM with IE9 and test in a bit. --  Gadget850 talk 12:54, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    But it does not show for IE9. This is a fresh VM from Microsoft. --  Gadget850 talk 15:12, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    I I do a user page with just <span class="mw-cite-backlink">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</span> then the content of the span shows. If I add a <ref> anywhere, then it shows briefly. --  Gadget850 talk 15:24, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    WFM in IE8 under XP, logged out. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:54, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    IE 7, 8, 10 and 11 all work. It is only IE9 that is affected. --  Gadget850 talk 20:00, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    Ref name used twice but does not say a and b

    Look at ref 2 in WHMA (AM).— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:04, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    @Vchimpanzee: Looks OK to me. How about ref 13? What browser? --  Gadget850 talk 18:15, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    Sorry, I went on to something else. Nothing works. I went to another article World oil market chronology from 2003 I knew had references used several times because I added them. I was relieved to see them, along with the arrows pointing up, but then they (and the a and b) disappeared. I have IE9.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:19, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    @WikiDan61 and Vchimpanzee: I think I know what is going on, but I have a real life interrupt. Need to do some testing and I might just have a fix. --  Gadget850 talk 20:09, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    @Gadget850: No rush in my case. I can live with the system as is. It just seemed odd. Glad you're on it. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 20:42, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    @WikiDan61 and Vchimpanzee: There were some recent accessibility changes to the Cite CSS that added user-select: none;.[61] This is not supposed to be supported by IE9 but, apparently it causes this to fail oddly.[62] Add this to your CSS and refresh: 

    .mw-cite-backlink, .cite-accessibility-label {display: inline}

    --  Gadget850 talk 20:49, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    I don't presently have any custom CSS defined. I'm not sure how or where to add this line. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 21:00, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    It works. Thank you. I had to go through my contibutions to find out how, but I knew I had seen a change I had to do recently.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:02, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    WikiDan61, User:WikiDan61/common.css.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:04, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    I took the liberty of creating it for you. Follow the instructions at the top of the page to refresh. --  Gadget850 talk 23:50, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Gadget850: Thank you. I'll check it when I'm back at the office in the morning. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 03:22, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    This was an interesting one to track down! Now documented at Help:Internet Explorer and T93319 (since anonymous readers can't apply CSS fixes). --  Gadget850 talk 06:45, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    @Gadget850: That worked for me (once I fixed the typo in my common.css file (you forgot the '.' before the mw-cite-backlink)). Thanks again! WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 11:59, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    Copy/paste strikes again! You are welcome. --  Gadget850 talk 14:05, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Recent change in RSS Syndication?

    I use The Old Reader to subscribe to the edit history sections of lots of articles which I want to monitor. Yesterday I started getting lots of old content served to me. I emailed The Old Reader support and they seem to think it's on Wikipedia's end ("Seems likely that its a change on their end. I don't have a record of feed, but these old posts were created in our system today, which suggests they arrived in the feed for the first time today, and did not exist before"). Anyone know what's up or have suggestions of where I should ask instead of here? Might be just a one time problem--haven't noticed the problem happening again today. Thanks. (I've cross-posted this at Wikipedia talk:Syndication and WP:HD).--Pengortm (talk) 22:30, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    We were serving up invalid IDs in the RSS feed. This was corrected, causing of course 'new IDs' for RSS element that had been issued invalid IDs in the past. It should be a one time event (or rather, maximum 3 times, since there are 3 groups of Wikimedia servers running which will go through a round of this upgrade). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:41, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks for the explanation. --Pengortm (talk) 16:02, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Quirk in watchlist

    I was briefly confused by what seemed to be an IP reverting ClueBot NG, but turned out to be the watchlist order being inverted (normally the edits run bottom to top in sequence), possible because ClueBot's revert has the same timestamp edit being reverted. Copied from my watchlist: 

               23:55:57  Micrometre‎‎ (2 changes | history) . . (0)‎ . . [ClueBot NG‎; 111.69.22.229‎]
           23:55:57 (cur | prev) . . (-2,576)‎ . . 111.69.22.229 (talk) (→‎SI standardisation)
    m      23:55:57 (cur | prev) . . (+2,576)‎ . . ClueBot NG (talk | contribs) (Reverting possible vandalism by 111.69.22.229 to version by Stevenmitchell. False positive? Report it. Thanks, ClueBot NG. (2167277) (Bot))

    Is this something that should be fixed? —Quondum 00:13, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Steps to reproduce for me: Enable "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc and "Expand watchlist to show all changes" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist. Watch Micrometre. View watchlist. Click triangle to the left of "Micrometre" on watchlist. The page history of the article shows the right order. The revision numbers are 652299116 for the IP and 652299128 for ClueBot NG. Several other pages on my watchlist had two edits the same minute, and all showed the right order. I added five other recently reverted articles at Special:Contributions/ClueBot NG to my watchlist. All were reverted in the same minute as the previous edit, and all were shown in the right order on my watchlist. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:42, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    PrimeHunter, for clarity, the above example is the the same second, not merely the same minute. And I take it from what you say that when you expand as described by clicking on the triangle, the last two lines above are swapped relative to the above (the above is in the incorrect order). It would be interesting if the same interface produces different results for the same information for different people. —Quondum 04:19, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    I reproduced your wrong order. "The page history of the article shows the right order" meant https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Micrometre&action=history. I don't display seconds and didn't notice the seconds in your quote. Selecting the last date format at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering gives me seconds. I get the right watchlist order for edits in the same minute but different seconds. I found another example with the same second at Row cover. There I get the wrong order again. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:12, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    I have recently been playing with mw:API:Usercontribs and found a couple of cases where my contributions were listed by the API with a slightly different order than shown using Special:Contributions (pairs of edits were reversed, as in the report here). I'm mentioning that in case someone wants to investigate, and I could look for examples if needed. Johnuniq (talk) 00:56, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    I've seen this before, at least three times over a period of many months (a few years?). It seems as if the query which obtains and sorts the rows for display is not taking the revision number into account when two edits have the same stored date/time. I believe that the stored time precision is to whole seconds, that being the precision of a UNIX time; although this is truncated to minutes for display. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:22, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    A new idea for the wiki software

    I have a new idea for wiki's software. I proposed it via Phabricator a week ago but no one answered. Am I doing something wrong? רן כהן (talk) 10:37, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    It's the wrong place if existing software features like Help:Collapsing are used. Content discussions about the English Wikipedia belong here at en.wikipedia.org. The below shows a way we could do it (could be made prettier), but I don't expect consensus for it. See MOS:CODE and WP:NOTREPOSITORY.
    Hello world code
    C
    #include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
}
    Java

    In console: 

    public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
}
    C#

    In a console or terminal: 

    using System;
class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!");
    }
}
    Or with an outer collapsed box:
    Hello world code
    C
    #include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
}
    Java

    In console: 

    public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
}
    C#

    In a console or terminal: 

    using System;
class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!");
    }
}
    It could for example be suggested at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computer science or Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). PrimeHunter (talk) 16:58, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thank you, I forgot that this feature existed. רן כהן (talk) 17:02, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Could someone help me put some color inside the top row of this box ?

    Tiger Orig Bok In Episo Spil Sen Send
    (IT)
    Produksjon:
    Rollebesetning:
    Handling:
    Boka:

    -- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ezzex (talk • contribs) 14:19, 20 March 2015‎

    @Ezzex: Examples shown above. Please be mindful of WP:COLOR. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:53, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    Many thanks.--Ezzex (talk) 15:13, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Is there a good way to ask for help with Graphics?

    I am hoping to get a colour added to Golan heights and East Jerusalem so as to differentiate them from the within armistice line territory claimed by Israel so as to distinguish them in a similar way as the West Bank. I think that a similar colour would do. All as per discussions Talk:Israel#Colouration proposal re: File:Israel districts.png and File talk:Israel districts.png#Proposal for colour changes. Thanks. GregKaye 17:18, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Map workshop. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:28, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Two toolbars in the editing window

    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T93384

    Please help remove excess panel. This happened after the last update. --Дагиров Умар (talk) 20:16, 20 March 2015 (UTC) This error in the Chechen Wikipedia.--Дагиров Умар (talk) 20:23, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    This is bug T93384.--Snaevar (talk) 23:19, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thank you so much. -- Дагиров Умар (talk) 23:42, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Rollback confirmation

    I'd like to propose a user preference to turn on a confirmation when using the rollback tool. I'm not the only one, as evidenced from the numerous previous discussions on this (linked below), that - especially from a mobile phone - has accidentally pressed the rollback button and rolled back a random edit without meaning to. To avoid this, I'd like to suggest that a yes/no confirmation, which could be exactly the same as the Thank yes/no confirmation, be added to the Rollback button. There were many users who expressed the fair opinion that rollback is meant to be quick and not require an extra click, so I think it makes sense for this to be an opt-in preference. Thoughts?

    There have been a few previous discussions on the implementation of a confirmation when rolling back, which might be worth a quick read before responding here: Rollback option, iPhone and rollback, Rollback on Watchlist really needs to go..., Rollback popup?, Adding a confirmation dialog to the watchlist rollback link. Sam Walton (talk) 20:31, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

    • Support I like the idea as an opt-in preference. For disabling rollback only on mobile devices, you can use a tiny script for that such as User:MusikAnimal/rollbackTouch.js. I could write another script equally as tiny to achieve the rollback confirmation you are after, but it would use the browser's confirm popup, with OK and Cancel buttons, rather than the little interface you see for thanking users. We could then add it as an opt-in gadget. — MusikAnimal talk 20:52, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
      If you're interested, here's a script that does what I was talking about: User:MusikAnimal/confirmationRollback. I could modify it or create a new version that only prompts for confirmation if on a mobile device, or only on watchlists, etc... all very easy to do. Cheers — MusikAnimal talk 00:04, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
      Here's one that only prompts on mobile: User:MusikAnimal/confirmationRollback-mobile. If this ever does become a gadget, we might consider enabling it by default. Note also the browser confirmation as opposed to the tiny interface seen when thanking someone, is probably more mobile-friendly anyway. — MusikAnimal talk 00:09, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
      +1 Hallelujah! I just tested this, and it works great! This is something I've wanted for a while. Imzadi 1979 → 02:58, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Support - Personally I'll probably never use it but for those on mobiles this is probably a dream come true :), I like the idea and I like the fact it's opt-in as opposed to it simply being forced down our throats!, Meh I don't see any harm in the opt-in message. –Davey2010Talk 21:49, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Support as long as it's opt-in. The whole point of rollback is that it doesn't require confirmation (because this slows things down a lot), so we shouldn't change the default, but of course it would be good if we gave the option to users who want it. Nyttend (talk) 13:15, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Support as opt-in - I can see that it may be useful for some users, but most rollback-capable users wouldn't want it. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:01, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Support as opt-in on main site support as opt-out on mobile. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:33, 19 March 2015 (UTC).
    • To hide the rollback button altogether on your watchlist use this:
    .mw-special-Watchlist .mw-rollback-link {
   display: none;
}

    KonveyorBelt 17:03, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

    I was actually thinking of a gadget rather than a core change. That way it'd be opt-in without requiring further code changes. wctaiwan (talk) 23:52, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Rich's suggestion of opt-out for mobile (and opt-in elsewhere?) is an excellent idea. I have only ever made a mistaken rollback once or twice on desktop, but can imagine it happening a lot more frequently on mobile. Andrew Gray (talk) 15:29, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    Updating list of 500 most viewed mathematics articles

    I'd be interested in updating the list found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Wikipedia_1.0/Frequently_viewed/List, which was last edited in 2009. Does anyone know what methods I can use to find the most-viewed mathematics articles as of this year? Is there currently a bot that could update this list for 2015?Brirush (talk) 14:26, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    For starters, see here [63], and this page [64] will let you query single articles. Getting a top 500 in category math from there would require a little scripting, but someone may already have tools to do that. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:36, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    Furthermore, something seems a little fishy about techniques used to make that list. Why is Albert_Einstein number 1? I wouldn't think he should count as a "math" article, and currently, his page has no categories that even contain the string "math", though maybe in the past his page had the category "mathematician" or something... SemanticMantis (talk) 16:48, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    In this context, "Math articles" are articles that are part of Wikiproject Mathematics.Brirush (talk) 16:57, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
    A page like WP:WA/PP, updated monthly by bot, can be set up for Wikiproject Mathematics (or any wikiproject) - see https://tools.wmflabs.org/popularpages/config.php to set it up - Evad37 [talk] 15:14, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    Wrong(?) diff

    diff bug

    Hello, I noticed that in this diff, part of the page which I did not touch is being shown as changed. I believe this to be a bug. Can someone report this on Phabricator ? (I don't have an account nor do I know how to check if this bug has already been reported.)

    See image. Thank you. --Siddhant (talk) 00:00, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    This will happen in a number of diff views by different programs. Notice that the </ref> at the end of the line didn't show as being changed. This is because the diff view engine thinks you inserted the content in the middle of the ref, rather than copied and pasted after it. --Izno (talk) 02:39, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    Ah. I see your point. Actually, what happned is that because of this ambiguity in deciding whether I inserted the text or appended it, the Citation bot ended up doing a botched up job via its followup edit. I'll report this to the Bot ownner. Furthermore, I was wondering if the diff software can/should be made to choose the appended text interpretaion over the inserted text interpretation? Can/should this be special cased? --Siddhant (talk) 03:36, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    I see no errors in Citation bot's edit. What you are seeing appears to me as purely an inadequacy in the diff program. It simply can't tell whether you inserted a new reference or extended the old one. I have seen this in diff output forever (for more than 20 years); diff is pretty smart, but it often reports that a whole word has been changed when I changed only one character, for example. A bug report on Phabricator might generate a useful programming challenge for some young and ambitious programmer who doesn't know what is impossible yet. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:32, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    You are correct! There is no error in the bot's edit (except the blank fields which is did not remove, but that's a minor problem. Thanks for your cleanup edit regarding that.) --Siddhant (talk) 07:55, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    It should be possible to enhance the diff so that it shows character differences instead of word differences. If you go to a file description page on Commons, and request rename of the file by using {{Rename}}, it presents a box showing two diffs. This is demonstrated on the template page itself, where under "Difference in words:" it shows all of the page name as changed, whereas under "Difference in characters:", the letters "e", "m" and "p" are shown as unchanged. Further examples make this clearer. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:42, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    I don't know what part of the software builds these character-based diffs, but I suspect it is some template or module; the transclusion mechanism at Commons is pretty horrid. As for why regular diffs seem to count the first occurence as changed; it is because a diff is usually build from end to beginning. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:31, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    Probably c:Module:Diff then. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:01, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    File:Italy vs Wales 2015-03-21.svg

    For some reason, a black box appears on this image when it is called in articles. The black box doesn't appear in the original image (here), so I can't explain why the Wikipedia software would render it. – PeeJay 18:08, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    @PeeJay2K3: I've come across this before, at File:Metropolitian Railway (1870).svg. In this case it was the presence of the following: 
      <flowRoot
     xml:space="preserve"
     id="flowRoot3396"
     style="fill:black;stroke:none;stroke-opacity:1;stroke-width:1px;stroke-linejoin:miter;stroke-linecap:butt;fill-opacity:1;font-family:Sans;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;font-size:40px;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px"><flowRegion
       id="flowRegion3398"><rect
         id="rect3400"
         width="91"
         height="46"
         x="231"
         y="921.39148" /></flowRegion><flowPara
       id="flowPara3402" /></flowRoot>
    That <rect /> drew the black rectangle, so  Done I removed it; I also removed the <flowRoot>...</flowRoot> <flowRegion>...</flowRegion> and <flowPara /> elements, since these are not documented in the SVG spec, and so their behaviour is unknown. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:47, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Redrose64: Thank you very much. That was bugging the crap out of me. I wonder why it happened! – PeeJay 20:09, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    That SVG has all the hallmarks of having been edited in Inkscape, which adds all sorts of strange stuff, ranging from undocumented elements through undocumented attributes on documented elements to undocumented values on documented properties. Ordinarily I would strip out all of the obvious Inkscape deadweight, and it would still render as intended. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:34, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    flowRoot is not supported by the SVG rendered in use by MediaWiki. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:16, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    OK, part of the issue is with Inkscape, which seems to be creating a file header that is inconsistent with its content. I've looked at the <svg> tag in that file, and it has the attribute version="1.0" The current W3C Recommendation (i.e. widely-accepted standard) for SVG is version 1.1, 16 August 2011, which lacks <flowRoot>...</flowRoot> and those others. These are proposed for SVG version 1.2, which is still a W3C Working Draft - last revision 13 April 2005, nearly ten years ago. It doesn't have a clickable Table of Contents, but googling around I found this older version. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:05, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    Andy Mackay infobox

    On the page for Andy Mackay, something isn't showing in the infobox. There's a line for "Instruments", shown here: | Instruments = Alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, keyboards, oboe, violin But as displayed, the line doesn't show. I've tried various fixes - changing the capital I to a lowercase, changing the location of the line - but they've had no effect in the page previews. What's causing this problem?Bjones (talk) 21:07, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    @Bjones: The infobox in question is {{Infobox musical artist}}, the documentation of which shows the parameter name is |instrument= (singular and lowercase). The parameter works if it is changed to that. SiBr4 (talk) 21:17, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
    Got it, and that did work. Thanks for your advice.Bjones (talk) 02:00, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    ARIA blocked?

    Hi all, I'm trying to address Template talk:Physics particle#Non-screenreader friendly by using dummy <sup> and <sub> tags while hiding the problematic tags in text-based browsers using aria-hidden. However, I found out that the WAI-ARIA attribute (or at least the one I'm using) seem to be blocked. An example can be seen in my sandbox, where the aria-hidden attribute seems to be stripped from the HTML output (by examining the source). Is is behavior documented? If so, is there any workarounds? Thanks. Timothy G. from CA (talk) 21:27, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    The attribute is not whitelisted. See Help:HTML in wikitext#Attributes. --  Gadget850 talk 21:33, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

    Special:Watchlist legend

    Don't know if anyone else has seen this, but the legend on my Watchlist page says "m This is a" instead of "m This is a minor edit". I've checked it back to what I believe is the MediaWiki page it originates from, but that page has the correct wording, and I couldn't edit it if it didn't. I thought some of you folks here might be able to fix it. BMK (talk) 01:06, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    Looks OK to me. Do you see this text: "minor edit" --  Gadget850 talk 01:10, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    No, you would not. User:Beyond_My_Ken/monobook.css contains:
    #minoredit_helplink { display: none;
}
    Which causes it to be hidden. --  Gadget850 talk 01:13, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    You must have added that code to hide the link in MediaWiki:Minoredit which is displayed next to the minor edit checkbox when editing, so you should also see "This is a" there. Some users hide the link to avoid accidentally hitting it during an edit. MediaWiki:Recentchanges-legend-minor uses the same id for the link so it also becomes hidden there. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:40, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    Added in this edit - almost five years ago. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:48, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    Upload constantly failing

    This logo, tried gif and jpg with an error message: This file did not pass verification. --Tito Dutta (talk) 01:50, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    The software checks to ensure the file matches the extension. Looks like it is a PNG image with a GIF extension. Rename it to a PNG extension. --  Gadget850 talk 01:59, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    When I type in John Coates into the wiki search bar John Coates (businessman) doesn't show up. Around 9 other John Coates are listed. The one I'm looking for is the CEO of bet365.

    However, when I type in John Coates businessman, he does show up.

    Is there any way of resolving this issue?

    Cheers,

    Alex

    --AlexMoscow74 (talk) 15:44, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    If you mean the drop-down suggestions when you type in the search box then at most 10 pages are selected and John Coates (businessman) doesn't currenly make the cut for "John Coates", but appears on "John Coates (". Nothing should be done about that. Don't try to game the system to get your preferred page to replace another. If you mean the disambiguation page John Coates then it's not a search feature but a manually edited page. An editor added the business man after your post.[65] The article author should have done it at the page creation but it's an inexperienced editor. If you mean the search results page for John Coates then the business man is currently the 11th result on the first page. Don't try to game the systemn to make him appear higher on the page. So regardless of what you meant, there is nothing more to do now. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:25, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Thank you PrimeHunter, I appreciate you help with resolving this issue. --AlexMoscow74 (talk) 10:05, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

    Where can I buy a wikipedia mediawiki clone with decent Captcha etc?

    Does anyone sell a wikipedia mediawiki clone? By this I mean wikipedia software with all of the incredible bells and whistles without the article content?

    Out of the box, mediawiki is just terrible as far as spam and malicious bots. It is amazing the trouble I have had with the 10+ mediawiki sites I have. If I don't immediately disable editing, I am assaulted with bots within weeks. The captchas are clunky and difficult for me to effectively install. Why doesnt a robust wikipedia like captcha come standard with mediawiki? To me, this is the biggest weakness of mediawiki.

    My account just was suspended with Namecheap:

    It has come to our attention that there is a huge amount of similar emails queued on the server by your hosting account ideakwty. Please note that transmitting any unsolicited commercial or bulk email, or being engaged in any activity known or considered to be spamming or Mail Bombing is expressly prohibited on our hosting servers according to our Acceptable Use Policy, paragraph 8. ‘Prohibited Activities’ www.namecheap.com/legal/hosting/aup.aspx
    As we can see, the emails are sent per each account registration on your web site [removed].com. In order to protect your web site from spam bot account registration please consider using anti spam software (e.g. Captcha).

    Please, please technical people - don't shoot the messenger. I am very technically savvy. This is a constant difficultly I have had for years with mediawiki.

    Again, Does anyone sell a wikipedia mediawiki clone with awesome captcha, etc?

    Thank you Namecheapblues (talk) 13:16, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    Have you checked mw:Manual:Combating spam? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 16:03, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    How have you configured Mediawiki? Are you requiring registration to edit? Have you turned on edit rate limiting? Do you enable uploading? Have you looked at the Installation guide? —EncMstr (talk) 19:38, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    thank you for suggestions. thank you for your help. yes I am doing all this.
    The problem is that mediawiki has a HUGE flaw.
    I wish I could spend my own money and buy wikipedia mediawiki. Namecheapblues (talk) 13:11, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
    It really depends on what you need exactly. A website that anyone can edit is doomed to have spam. Besides setting up a decent captcha (which is definitely possible by Mediawiki, through extensions), you might want preventing new account registration, forcing new edits to be approved by a seasoned user, forcing users to verify their account, ... Otherwise, there are a lot of alternatives: List of wiki software. -- Luk talk 13:36, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

    Duplicate files

    Hello, User:Ebraminio wrote a php tool that can list duplicate files in certain Wikipedia and Wikimedia commons. This is result for English Wikipedia (the file is too big to copy paste it in a Wiki page). English Wikipedia should have a bot to delete these files. :)Ladsgroupoverleg 17:44, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    These can't be deleted by bot because they first need to be carefully checked for errors. For example, fair use files are sometimes posted to Commons with bogus copyright tags and should instead be nominated for deletion on Commons, and some people upload files to Commons without providing correct source information. quarry:query/947 can also be used for finding untagged files on Commons. A bot could maybe add {{subst:ncd}} to the files, but this assumes that the deleting admin carefully cleans up the files and nominates files on Commons as necessary. --Stefan2 (talk) 20:39, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    I used to have a bot doing just that, but it needed careful human examination: lots of duplicates are moves from Wikipedia to Commons, with incorrect licensing information. And of course non-free files that would get moved to Commons by someone who doesn't know better, and get deleted there after a few months. -- Luk talk 13:39, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

    Tech News: 2015-13

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

    Changes this week

    • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
    • The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [66]
    • VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [67] [68] [69]
    • When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [70]

    Meetings

    • You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
    • You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

    Future changes

    • Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [71]

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

    15:10, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

    Patrolling notification

    I just saw a discussion in which an interesting suggestion is raised, but I'm not sure how to help (let alone if help is needed), so I'm just bringing it here.

    Hi, could you explain to me what "user was patrolled by.. " in this case you, means? I did not find any objective information on that. Greetings!Lucentcalendar (talk) 11:31, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

    @Lucentcalendar: It basically just means I decided the page is ok and not vandalism, spam or anything. Not sure if you've seen m:Help:Patrolled edit, but there's more information there. The notification thingy should probably link to some help page or other so that people won't be confused. ekips39 (talk) 20:00, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thank you. Your site is OK too, I would go a bit easier on the colors, but that is certainly a matter of taste. There is no information shown about patrols and googling it only found information about patrolling new content pages and harassment of administrators against users.Lucentcalendar (talk) 07:59, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

    I assume that this is new page patrol, but I'm not sure. Could a link be added, as suggested by ekips? Nyttend (talk) 01:16, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    I'm tracking changes related to WP:The Wikipedia Library at Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library. Oddly, several biographies are included in the list including: Albert Einstein and William Shakespeare.

    What those pages happy to have in common is the Template:Library_resources_box. But despite looking in that template, in the page's source code, and the page's html. I can't find a link to The Wikipedia Library in any of them. So... why are they showing up in the related changes feed? Thanks! Ocaasi t | c 17:51, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    WP:The Wikipedia Library mentions those authors in the quote section at the bottom. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:44, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    Ohhhhh. Thanks! @John of Reading:. Cheers, Jake Ocaasi t | c 23:01, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    Error when displaying Wikipedia:Featured_topics/count

    I simply loaded the page (I didn't edit it), and after 'All articles tagged as being part of a good topic:' and 'Total:', I get an 'Expression error: Unrecognized punctuation character ",".'

    I don't know where to even begin searching to fix this; the most (I think) I know for sure is that there's a problematic comma within those templates (or scripts?) that became transcluded onto the Featured topics count page.

    Anything I could rely upon for future reference would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Googol30 (talk) 07:38, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    The four-digit counts were causing problems. I've fixed it, with some help from Help:Magic words. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:53, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    Islamic calendar

    Hi. The diff shows an edit by CambridgeBayWeather at 06:57 but the history ends with an edit at 16:44 yesterday. There is an "edit this page" tab but clicking on it produces an "editing is restricted to registered users" notice. How can this be? 87.81.147.76 (talk) 13:22, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    Your browser may have cached Islamic calendar and the page history before the protection by CambridgeBayWeather at 06:57. Try to bypass your cache. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:36, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
    It cleared. Thanks. 87.81.147.76 (talk) 15:33, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    Is Move-to-commons assistant malfunctioning?

    I have previously easily used this tool to move an image from Wikipedia to Commons. The last few times over a series of recent weeks, I tried on various files with Tools using OAuth Uploader, the OAuth Uploaders tells me I've authorized it. But when I do a "refresh" on the page where I'm doing the move, it goes through the motions and then kicks up the message:

    Querying CommonSense ...done.
    Querying image data ...done.
    Retrieving image description ...done.
    ERROR: null

    If while still logged in on Uploader, I go back to the original file to try again, in this case File:New York Dramatic Mirror June1910.jpg, it will go through the motions and still kick up the above error message. The image never gets uploaded at Commons. Since it worked before, why is it not now? — Maile (talk) 19:46, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    I see a July 2014 message identical to mine on Commons: Discussion. No answer was posted there. — Maile (talk) 19:52, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
    Have you informed Magnus on this wiki? --Redrose64 (talk) 19:56, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks. I just posted to his talk page. — Maile (talk) 20:05, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    Extension:Gather launching on beta

    Greetings,

    It is my first time to announce here. I am Moushira, a new community liaison for mobile products and I have some updates to share :). So, Extension:Gather has been in development for a while and is now ready for beta launch on wp:en mobile web by next week, where mobile logged in users activating their beta features option, will have the possibility to create and share public lists of their articles. For more information, kindly check the FAQ and feel free to add comments and further questions. I would have ideally loved to share more updates earlier, however, there are details that were only clarified/solved very recently, without which earlier announcement would have been vague. Lets look forward to awesome lessons to learn on beta. Thank you :). --Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    Can someone log a bug for me?

    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T86454

    Could someone with an account please log this as a bug? I am unfamiliar with the system for reporting bugs and I do not have an account. While this bug is quite easily circumventable, it really is a bit silly that something so glaringly obvious has not been fixed long ago. Thanks to any person who can do this on my behalf. 86.152.162.108 (talk) 18:18, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    already logged (patch pending review). thanks. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:27, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thank you! 86.152.162.108 (talk) 21:48, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
    @86.152.162.108: mw:How to report a bug explains the system and you can reuse any Wikimedia account in that system. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:35, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

    Template:Flagbig/core

    Please edit the default flagicon size in Template:Flagbig/core because the current code {{#if:{{{size|}}}|{{{size}}}|30x27px}} causes incorrect flagbig of Switzerland – see 2015 Davis Cup#World Group. In other words, remove that exception for fixed sizes (if:size|size) and set a new default height, I propose 21 or 22 px. Maiō T. (talk) 21:11, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

    Fixed size

    I've added parameter fixed size = 23x16px into Template:Country data Switzerland/sandbox, and also added a switch into Template:Flagicon/core/sandbox. I think it will work.

    • Switzerland ← flagicon|Switzerland
    • Switzerland

    Austria-Hungary ← flagicon/sandbox|Switzerland/sandbox

    • Switzerland ← flagicon|Switzerland|size=30x30px
    • Switzerland

    Austria-Hungary ← flagicon/sandbox|Switzerland/sandbox|size=30x30px Now we need to edit all articles from Category:Country data templates with distinct default size and also the templates flag...xyz.../core. (Except flagbig/core)
    Maiō T. (talk) 13:33, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    That is horrible. What are you trying to acomplish? Why pollute the code this way to single out one flag? It doesn't even seem to do anything different. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 14:03, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    Since standard-sized flags wouldn't include this "fixed size" parameter, what about just doing this? SiBr4 (talk) 14:20, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    SiBr4, thanks! That's much much better. User:Edokter, what do you say? Maiō T. (talk) 14:59, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    {{{fixed size}}} is redundant here. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:58, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Edokter:
    No, it isn't redundant. It's necessary, because Template:flagbig currently uses parameter {{{size}}} of Switzerland (and others, e.g. Vatican City, North Dakota ...) which is 16px. See:
    {{flagbig|MON}}

    Monaco
    {{flagbig|SUI}}

    Switzerland
    {{flagbig|VAT}}

    Vatican City
    {{flagbig|North Dakota}}

    North Dakota
    {{flagbig|NIG}}

    Niger
    Therefore I'm trying to fix it with "fixed size". Maiō T. (talk) 17:11, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    {{Flagicon/core}} can handle only one size parameter, so it is redundant. This must be fixed in {{flagbig}} to pass the right size. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 17:50, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Edokter:
    No way. {{flagbig}} needs empty {{{size}}} parameter, therefore it's necessary to edit country-data templates – remove {{{size}}} & add {{{fixed size}}}, but this action could corrupt the flag.../core results. So, I need to add just one word into "flag.../core" templates.
    Maiō T. (talk) 18:55, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    You completely lost me here. Anything passed with {{{fixed size}}} can be passed with {{{size}}} to {{Flagicon/core}}. Why does it need to be a separate parameter? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 20:20, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Edokter: I just need an empty {{{size}}} parameter in Country-Data articles for correct use in template:flagbig. Currently are 8 flagicons displayed incorrectly with template:flagbig. Maiō T. (talk) 22:49, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    Ideally, flags that are larger by default in 23x15px flag templates should be larger by default in other-size flag templates as well. Instead of setting the default for those flags at a certain number of pixels (whether in all templates, as is the case now, or in 23x15px templates only, using the proposed "fixed size"), I added a parameter for relative size increase to the sandboxes:

    Flag Flag/sandbox Flagbig Flagbig/sandbox
     UK Script error: The function "main" does not exist.
    United Kingdom
    United Kingdom
     France Script error: The function "main" does not exist.
    France
    France
      Switzerland Script error: The function "main" does not exist.
    Switzerland
    Switzerland

    Instead of being fixed at 23x16px, the height of the Swiss flag using the sandbox is set at 110% of that of other flags, rounded to an integer number of pixels. That means the height for Switzerland using {{flagbig/sandbox}} is increased from 21px to 23px. SiBr4 (talk) 12:48, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    SiBr4, the {{flagbig/core}} template doesn't require a percentage increase of size; I've edited its sandbox to default 32x23px and the result is the same – see above. Problem with size is only in flag-, flagicon-, flaglink-, and flagu- cores.
    Your idea with 110 % is pretty good, but the code seems too long (and for User:Edokter – "horribly" long) (joke)
    Your idea with size increase parameter:
    – change from  23x15px  to  23x{{#if:{{{size increase|}}}|{{#expr:{{{size increase}}}*15 round 0}}|15}}px
    My idea with fixed size parameter:
    – change from  23x15px  to  {{{fixed size|23x15px}}}
    And the result would be the same.
    I propose to edit the flag-, flagicon-, flaglink-, and flagu- cores with "fixed size" parameter or something even shorter.
    The second problem is how to achieve a consensus; this is almost a forgotten discussion. Maiō T. (talk) 23:15, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    The code is longer than that for the "fixed size", but it is in no way horrible. While 32x23px may work for Switzerland, don't forget about the flag of Nepal, which would be 2px less tall than Switzerland without any size increase:
    Flagbig, fixed at 32x23px
    United Kingdom
    France
    Switzerland
    Nepal
    Flagbig with dynamic height
    United Kingdom
    France
    Switzerland
    Nepal
    Regarding consensus for "fixed size", I'd suggest starting a thread (possibly an RfC) at WP:WPFT and posting a neutral message linking to that on each template's talk page. I'd like the relative size increase option to be considered as well. Note that {{air force}}, {{army}}, {{flagc}}, {{flagcountry}}, {{flagdeco}}, {{flaglist}}, {{flagright}}, {{navy}} and probably more templates also use 23x15 icons. SiBr4 (talk) 11:52, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    Note that the "size increase" code can be shortened to 23x{{#expr:{{{size increase|1}}}*15 round 0}}px with the same result (assuming the parameter won't be set to an empty string). I don't know what's better from a performance standpoint.
    Or, to avoid expression errors with empty or invalid parameter values, 23x{{#iferror:{{#expr:{{{size increase|1}}}*15 round 0}}|15}}px. SiBr4 (talk) 12:13, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    User:SiBr4 I believe, the people of Nepal will not be angry to us because of 23px height (current Nepal's flagbig is 22px high).
    Alternatively, we could enlarge it to 25px through {{{#if}}}: "if no borders then size=32x25"
    Maiō T. (talk) 15:21, 27 March 2015 (UTC)


    Reduction of big flagicons

    Template_talk:Flagbig/core#Template-protected_edit_request_on_21_March_2015

    Please support my proposal for reduction of big default sizes in template:flagbig.

    current
    default size
    30x27px max.    		 proposed
    default size
    30x21px max.    		 real size change

    France
    France    		 —

    Niger
    Niger    		 from 30x26px to 25x21px

    Great Britain
    Great Britain    		 —

    Monaco
    Monaco    		 from 30x24px to 26x21px

    United States
    United States    		 —

    Denmark
    Denmark    		 from 30x23px to 28x21px

    Canada
    Canada    		 —

    San Marino
    San Marino    		 from 30x23px to 28x21px

    Germany
    Germany    		 —

    Norway
    Norway    		 from 30x22px to 29x21px

    Qatar
    Qatar    		 —

    Iceland
    Iceland    		 from 30x22px to 29x21px

    Thanks, Maiō T. (talk) 22:58, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

    Please be careful with how you word requests for action so that you do not canvass. --Izno (talk) 23:10, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
    What is the rationale here? It makes some flags not big anymore. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:17, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
    User:Edokter – some big flags are currently not big, some are very big. What do you think about compromise dimensions 32x23px? Maiō T. (talk) 13:05, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

    Icons

    Is there a reason top icons such as Template:Featured article now appear much larger than before? Is there a way to deactivate this change? Seattle (talk) 04:16, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    Mr._Stradivarius and Edokter are working on converting all topicons to a system that will work better for different skins (incl mobile), the Visual Editor and live previewing. This might have some temporary side effects for a while, and if you point them out, I'm sure they can fix them. Is Template:Featured_article/sandbox perhaps more alike with what we had before ?? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:39, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    BTW, I personally actually like the new size better. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:46, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    20px is now the default for {top icon} (as opposed to the old 15px) as that is the default for the indicator system. Actually not quite true, but the documentaion gives an example using 20px, which does look better. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:58, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    GeoGroupTemplate again

    {{GeoGroupTemplate}} was recently switched to use OpenStreetMap after Google stopped supporting the relevant service. It initially worked well, but now it's not doing anything; do we know what's wrong? If you go to National Register of Historic Places listings in Belmont County, Ohio and click the OSM link, it takes you to this page, which just sits there, nothing but whitespace. The tool itself looks like it's working fine, since the Bing link goes to this page, which displays as expected. It's not vandalism to the Belmont County page; I've gotten similar results from pages in my userspace that use this template, and they've not been edited by anyone except for me. The last edit to the template itself was by Doncram, just moving Bing-related text and not touching the OSM stuff, and anyway it was working a day or two after he edited it. I also don't see anything weird with Special:RecentChangesLinked. I've tried this with Windows 8.1, using both IE11 and Firefox 36.0.4. Nyttend backup (talk) 13:28, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    https://tools.wmflabs.org/osm4wiki seems to be completely down. de:Wikipedia:Technik/Labs/Tools#Geo gives a start page https://tools.wmflabs.org/osm4wiki/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki-osm.pl which is also blank. The tool maintainers are listed at https://tools.wmflabs.org/#toollist-osm4wiki. They link to German user pages. I don't currently see any reports of the problem at de:Benutzer Diskussion:Plenz or de:Benutzer Diskussion:Kolossos. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:38, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    See my post of 11:32, 26 March 2015 regarding the reliability of tools.wmflabs.org - i.e. try again, but not too often. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:17, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    Yeah, I saw it yesterday — I was going to report this then, but I decided to wait and try again every several hours. I didn't notice that the OSM tool is different from the Bing tool; that's why I was confused, since I thought the same tool was working for one thing but not for another. Nyttend (talk) 15:54, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    Problems in my Firefox browser history when javascript is on while viewing Wikipedia articles

    A strange issue began a few weeks ago [maybe since Jan 1, 2015] when viewing wikipedia articles: When clicking on a "Contents" link, my Firefox generates SEVERAL EXTRA, identical pages. Also, a more irritating problem is: While reviewing a history list of previously viewed articles, LATER web pages in the 'History' disappear[!!] while reviewing a Wikipedia page (making the currently appearing Wiki the MOST RECENT, and LOSING my LATER viewed web pages). The ONLY way I've found to prevent this, is to TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT while viewing Wikipedia. What happened to Wikipedia? This did NOT happen to me last year using the SAME PC and browser.

    NOW I'M GETTING REALLY ANGRY AT THIS !!!!! Every time I try to edit THIS, the "Edit Summary" link WIPES OUT MY QUESTION/COMMENT!!! So much for any DONATIONS!!! I've been trying to alert SOMEONE to the FACT that JAVASCRIPT on Wikepedia keeps WIPING OUT the FIREFOX FORWARD HISTORY after the Wikipedia page being displayed. IT'S A SERIOUS BUG which does NOT occur when JavaScript is OFF!!!!! [And it is NOT MALWARE]

    Thanks for reading, Steve [Remembering to sign now] 75.175.254.143 (talk) 22:53, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

    You may need to bypass your cache (due to some bad change on the Wikipedia side). I might also suggest you run a malware and virus detection program. --Izno (talk) 23:26, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
    Please do not remove others' comments added in good faith, per the talk page guidelines. Thanks. --Izno (talk) 17:16, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    Do these bad things happen if you try "Help > Restart with add-ons disabled" in the Firefox menu? That might help to narrow down the problem. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:13, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    Does the problem still happen if you start Firefox in Safe Mode? (Safe Mode disables extensions and themes, hardware acceleration and some JavaScript stuff in order to exclude some possible reasons for problems. It does not disable plugins which are add-ons.) See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode . And does this also happen with a new and empty profile? See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic%20Troubleshooting#w_8-make-a-new-profile and http://support.mozilla.org/kb/Managing%20profiles . --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 02:39, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    How possible is it to alter conventions for within header title presentation?

    I have just presented a proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Proposed change for headers (allowing parenthesis texts to be used at reduced sized).

    I anyone advise regarding the practicalities of the proposals. Depending on both the practicalities and editor reactions a next step might be to convert the thread to an RfC. GregKaye 11:41, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    Template:Winners vs. Template:Winners-other

    Hello everybody, what's your opinion on these flagicons? A year ago, they were the same (100px wide). But then came one user and (without any discussion) reduced it to 50px and then once more. I think, the best would be something in between. Maiō T. (talk) 20:03, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    Why is this a VPT matter? Surely it would be better discussed at Template talk:Winners or Template talk:Winners-other? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:10, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    Okay, this discussion continues at Template talk:Winners. Maiō T. (talk) 22:24, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    Suppressing redirects

    Without a major software change would it be possible to either automatically or give users the option to suppress the creation of redirects upon moves in certain namespaces, but not others? Kharkiv07Talk 21:37, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    Yes; admins are able to suppress the creation of redirects upon moves (the checkbox is called "Leave a redirect behind", enabled by default, and admins have the ability to deselect it). Giving this option to regular users has has been suggested before, but declined because of the potential for page move vandalism. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:41, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    But my question is if it could be done in specific namespaces, namely user and draft. Kharkiv07Talk 23:42, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    Most templates in category

    I have a category X, which is populated with articles. And I have templates A, B, C, D, E, F, which (to some articles in category — none, some — few, maybe some — all) are used in articles from category X. Is it possible (with quarry, I suppose) to get information, which articles has the most of those six templates. And article with B, C, D (in this case) is the same as article with A, E, F, I just need the number. The desired result would be:

    Article Template count
    Article1 6
    Article2 6
    Article3 3
    Article4 1
    Article5 0

    If it's possible with quarry, then maybe somebody could write the SQL query, at least the skeleton. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 23:24, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    Generate a list of articles I have created

    How can I generate a list of articles I have created? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 18:36, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

    With this tool: [72].·maunus · snunɐɯ· 18:39, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
    Yours is over here. Impressive number by the way. You can access this link from the bottom of your user contributions. EoRdE6(Come Talk to Me!) 18:41, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
    FWIW, it is possible on-wiki as well, though without an option to exclude redirects and page moves. SiBr4 (talk) 19:11, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
    Hmm, I make a lot of edits but don't create many pages, so my corresponding query stressed the servers:
    A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software.

    Function: IndexPager::buildQueryInfo (contributions page unfiltered)
    Error: 2013 Lost connection to MySQL server during query (10.64.32.25)
    -- John of Reading (talk) 19:53, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
    The link to your created pages works fine for me – it shows 44 pages, the most recent of which is Louis Legendre (disambiguation). SiBr4 (talk) 20:32, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
    I'm surprised it's that many. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:36, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Maunus: This tool: [73] you recommended seems to be down. GoingBatty (talk) 00:59, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    Works fine for me.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 02:43, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    Working now - thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:22, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    This is a long-term problem: the tool (like several others hosted at tools.wmflabs.org) is often down for periods ranging from minutes to days. What I do is to try later, at increasing intervals (e.g. 2 mins, 10 mins, 1 hour, 6 hours etc.) until it cooperates. If you try too often, you may overload the server, which may be one of the original causes of the downtime. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:32, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    Wow, more than I thought! Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:02, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

    Need assistance over image files

    I left a message at User talk:Mark Arsten#Image file restoration over image files, but now I just realised that the user is not active anymore. Can anyone please help me?

    The message I left:

    1. I uploaded a screenshot of Marceline from Adventure Time intro at File:Adventure Time - Marceline.png, but someone put a new version of the file with another image of the character, and the older version I put has gone. As the Fair Use Rationale (that I put) became useless (since that new image doesn't match the description), and I have no way to recover the original, I simply removed the rationale from that file. Now, the file is going to be deleted within a few days because it has no rationale. Can you recover the original image for me? (It's Marceline holding a red axe bass.)
    2. I once requested you to restore File:Fosters intertitle.jpg, and you did it. But then I was busy and I forgot to replace Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends article's infobox image with the file. Can you restore the file once again? I'll replace the image within the days given.

    JSH-alive/talk/cont/mail 15:37, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

    JSH-alive/talk/cont/mail 16:56, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

     Done I have completed both of these requests. -- Diannaa (talk) 23:04, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thank you very much! JSH-alive/talk/cont/mail 14:59, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    Confirmation message for un-watchlisting a page?

    Just noticed for the first time, that un-watching pages shows a warning message "Remove this page from your watchlist?" with a "Yes" button to click. Some problems with it:

    1. The message has only a "yes" option (without "no" such a warning is fairly pointless).
    2. It seems to show up only the first time for every page.
    3. After clicking "yes", the blue star to indicate watch-status is not actualized (and the affected page is not reloaded).

    This archived thread Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_110#Unwatch_bug.3F mentions, that this extra message was caused by the Wikimedia software in the past. Is is possible to disable that bugged feature? (I searched my gadgets and preferences, but couldn't find it). I am using vector skin, Windows XP and FF (latest version). GermanJoe (talk) 11:13, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    This is the HTML fallback. You must have a Javascript problems or something. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:57, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    I had the problem like 10 times before posting here, but couldn't force another occurence since then. Should I try Java tracing and logging or how can I see, which method/problem caused the fallback? It seems to be very sporadic and only happened in the last few days afaik (but now I am curious). Current Java version is (Build 1.8.0_31-b13). GermanJoe (talk) 13:36, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    The default behaviour is to confirm all watch/unwatch requests. However, when you watch/unwatch a page using the white/blue star (Vector) or the watch/unwatch tab (MonoBook), the URL that is sent includes a token which tells the MediaWiki servers which page you wish to watch/unwatch. If this matches the pagename in the URL, the confirmation step is skipped. Thus, if the page names differ, or the token is corrupt or missing, it falls back to requesting confirmation. You can see the confirmation step in action by using a URL without a token: {{Watch|Example}} → watch --Redrose64 (talk) 14:21, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    Maybe the connection is just too slow at times or some background process is not finished (I noticed, that "loading data" is sometimes still displayed in the footer while the page is already fully available). I'll keep watching for this. Thanks for providing all that background information, it's very helpful to understand the situation. GermanJoe (talk) 15:45, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    When searching for this article 2012 Virginia Beach F/A-18 Crash using Yahoo or Bing they go to a deleted version from 2012. A Google search will lead to the most recent version. Can't figure why. Samf4u (talk) 16:42, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    Yahoo! Search is powered by Bing so it's not unexpected that they give the same result. They both give a blurb from the current 2012 Virginia Beach F/A-18 Crash with uppercase C in Crash, and write the title as "2012 Virginia Beach F/A-18 Crash" with uppercase C. But they both link the search to the deleted 2012 Virginia Beach F/A-18 crash with lowercase c. That's odd. It appears that either we served the upper case C version on the lowercase c url when Bing read and cached the page 16-03-2015, or Bing corrupted the url in their database. All links ("Article", "Talk" and so on) in Bing's cached version go to uppercase C. I guess this is Bing's error but it could also be ours. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:44, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks for looking into this Prime Hunter. The issue has been resolved by changing capital C in crash to a lower case c by Izno (talk). Samf4u (talk) 20:39, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    That actually doesn't fix the problem per se, I was just following WP:AT when I moved it. --Izno (talk) 21:30, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    Quick reasoning for Template Editor protection level?

    I'm feeling lazy so can someone answer a quick question, please. Was the main reason for implementing the "template-protected" protection level 1) downgrading protection from sysop level in those templates that can be edited by experts, or was it 2) upgrading protection from semi-protection to combat serious vandalism? Or both? I am thinking about an additional protection level for fi-wiki and need some info. Links are welcome, too. --Pxos (talk) 21:26, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    • WP:PINKLOCK This is a protection level that replaces full protection on pages that are merely protected due to high transclusion rates, rather than content disputes. It should only be used on templates whose risk factor would have otherwise warranted full protection. It should not be used on less risky templates on the grounds that the template editor user right exists – the existence of the right should not result in more templates becoming uneditable for the general editing community. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 21:42, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks! I'm now a bit embarassed because I was too lazy. I even managed to find the RfC now. --Pxos (talk) 22:00, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    Recent change to HTTPS/SSL/TLS settings on en-wiki?

    Resolved

    I use AWB on Linux using wine. It stopped working yesterday morning UTC (26 March 2015) with error "GnuTLS error: An unexpected TLS handshake packet was received", I could not log in (using HTTPS). Testing further, I find that Internet Explorer under wine loading page https://en.wikipedia.org/ gives the same error and page doesn't load at all. AWB was working up to around 1800 UTC on Wednesday (25 March 2015). AWB fine under Windows so is clearly some sort of wine/Linux utilities issue, though as none of these have changed on my side, something else must have changed. So has something changed/security been raised on wikipedia side? Thanks Rjwilmsi 09:28, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    mw:MediaWiki 1.25/wmf22 was just deployed. I don't see anything relevant in the change list; take a look and see if anything pops out. -- Gadget850 talk 09:36, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    This is an educated guess. A little while back (a few weeks? months now?) some changes were made to the SSL/TLS infrastructure that made IE6/Windows XP clients no longer able to use our SSL services (due to XP only supporting broken protocols and cipher combinations). My guess is that Wine is similarly impacted by this change and you're seeing it now because your previous login session has ended and you have to log in again. I'm not sure if this is actually the case or what the workaround would be (other than using your native Windows, which seems to work). ^demon[omg plz] 13:29, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    Yes, must have been something like that. I have managed to resolve this one, took some faffing. Information for others: resolution on opensuse 13.1 (64 bit, 32 bit WINEARCH) was to install libgnutls28 and libgnutls28-32bit packages from opensuse 13.2 update repo (so version 3.2.18-4.1), replacing the version 3.2.4 packages from opensuse 13.1 oss or 13.1 update repos. Rjwilmsi 10:12, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Ping

    I've had two people ping me in a post when they replied to me right? But I never got a notification that they mentioned me. I noticed that they did the {{ name here thing }} correctly. Using a phone and browser with no app downloaded. I should have gotten a notification here and at the Teahouse from that user and EoReD (something like that) respectively. Anyone that replies, ping me to see if it works too. I'll say if I got a notification and I'll keep checking back here just to make sure. Sorry if this is written terribly. DangerousJXD (talk) 06:06, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    @DangerousJXD: The message to you at User talk:Human3015 wasn't signed. From Wikipedia:Notifications, "Note that the post containing a link to a user page must be signed" -- John of Reading (talk) 06:45, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Tech News: 2015-14

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

    Recent changes

    • You can now hide site banners even if you don't have an account. [74]
    • You can now add citations more easily with VisualEditor on the French and Italian Wikipedia. The tool adds the information when you add some types of links. In the future you will be able to add this tool to your wiki. [75] [76] [77]
    • All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [78]
    • You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [79]
    • VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [80]

    Changes this week

    • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 31. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 1 (calendar).
    • VisualEditor is now the main editing tool on 53 more Wikipedias. [81]
    • You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [82]
    • You can test a new tool on the beta mobile site on the English Wikipedia. With the new tool, you can create lists of articles. [83]
    • You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [84]
    • VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [85] [86] [87] [88]

    Meetings

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

    15:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    WMF donation appeal blocked my viewing of Wikipedia, with no option to dismiss

    I have a link to my contributions page on my smartphone, and I checked it just now to see if the page I most recently edited was still "current" or if it had been edited. Unfortunately, I was taken to 1 (archived at 2), which has no obvious way to leave the donation page to get to the page I wanted to see. This must be some sort of fundraising error, right? Shouldn't there be a prominent option to leave the donation page to actually get to the Wikipedia page I chose to see? Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 02:55, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Obviously you have to make a donation before you can proceed. Just kidding. I can't help much with the problem, but here's a link to your contribs if that will help. I'm ignorant as to the mobile platform and unclear as to whether you were able to get there via a different route. ―Mandruss ☎ 03:03, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    I don't think users can be redirected from en.wikipedia.org to donate.wikimedia.org. You probably got a donation banner here at en.wikipedia.org and clicked it without realizing it. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks. That seems very possible, as my phone does do funny things. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 21:02, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    HTTP becomes HTTPS

    A ref on Laser cutting#Pulsing at the end of the section ...from adhering to the side of the hole or cut. has an external link to http://web.gat.com/pubs-ext/miscpubs/A25867.pdf. However, Wikipedia appears to redirect to the secure version HTTPS://... web.gat.com web site does not appear to handle https, so it uses http. IE as well as Chrome responds with something like: There is a problem with this website’s security certificate... Is there a way of having the the EL use HTTP: rather than HTTPS: so that this problem does not occur? Thanks Jim1138 (talk) 07:26, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    The redirection from http to https is at the target, it's an issue in their server. You could of course bypass the redirect and go directly to https, but in both cases Chrome will inform users that something with their certificates isn't as it should be (for a value of "should" determined by the Chromium project, not necessarily matching any IETF RFC.) –Be..anyone (talk) 07:42, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Sadly misconfigured HTTPS variants of sites are very common, a big issue is when the site is served by a CDN but of course the certificate is for the CDN not the site's domain. But in this case it seems there's a simple solution as the problem is simply that the certificate is for a different subdomain, fusion.gat.com which seems to serve the content fine [90] Nil Einne (talk) 12:43, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Nil Einne Thanks for fixing the link too! Also updated Laser drilling Jim1138 (talk) 17:15, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    MediaWiki error performing transwiki

    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T94325

    I just transwiki'd two pages requested at WP:RFPI, (User:Dan Koehl/Ditmar Koel; User:Dan Koehl/Alfred Brazier Howell). In both cases the import failed with a try again server error, but the page history WAS imported. However, the log entry was not created on the import log or in the page history. (Ping to @Graham87: for awareness). Any suggestions? — xaosflux Talk 17:52, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    See phab:T94325 Glaisher (talk) 17:54, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thank you @Glaisher: that's exactly the issue; subscribed to the bug. — xaosflux Talk 17:57, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    New editnotice created, but it doesn't appear when the page is edited

     Done Fixes to this notice's parameter, mediawiki, and templates - great community response to resolve all quickly. — xaosflux Talk 02:36, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

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

    We created a new editnotice at:

    Template:Editnotices/Page/Comparison of EDA software

    ...by when we try to edit the associated article (Comparison of EDA software) the text the template carries doesn't appear at all. Any clues? Thanks! SageGreenRider (talk) 21:00, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    • Little more detail. When you mouse over the link for the editnotice for the page, navpop shows the source for the edit notice, but it doesn't display (at least not with wikEd enabled, I haven't tested other ways). — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 21:30, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    There have been some changes to the edit notice system. I pinged User:Catrope and USer:Krinkle on IRC, it'll take a few minutes. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:41, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Other mainspace pages w/editnotices, e.g. One Direction show the same problem, but Talk:One Direction shows its editnotice correctly. For those which fail to display, when edit the page (whole page or single section) the top and left menus are reduced to 90% of normal size. This has happened before somewhere, IIRC there was an unclosed <div> which set 90% font size. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:45, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Seems to be related to recent changes at MediaWiki:Editnotice-notext. I just deleted this message to revert it to default. @Krinkle:; @Technical 13:. — xaosflux Talk 21:56, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Xaosflux: The MediaWiki:Editnotice-notext page is harmless. It makes something appear after Template:Editnotice load has been tried first. It can only make something appear where there would otherwise be nothing. It cannot cause something to disappear. Krinkle (talk) 21:58, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Well for Template:Editnotices/Page/Comparison of EDA software the problem is just user error, there is no param value "infinite", it should be "indefinite" —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:59, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Also, if Template:Editnotice load/notext is being loaded to MediaWiki, shouldn't it be full-protected? But something else is going on here; now with that message deleted I'm not getting prompts to create page notices/etc. I'm going to be offline for a few hours, please update here any other changes. — xaosflux Talk 22:02, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Deleted the bad expiry parameter, appearing now. This is failing in a very poor way though. — xaosflux Talk 22:04, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Restored the deleted mediawiki message, protected the transcluded template as well. — xaosflux Talk 22:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    It's not "all good now". When I edit Wikipedia talk:Editnotice, the 90% size problem is there - and that page doesn't even have an editnotice. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:35, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    (edit conflict) If a page does not have an edit notice then the MonoBook edit window currently reduces the font size on tabs and the sidebar, at least for me in Firefox. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foobar&useskin=monobook and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foobar&action=edit&useskin=monobook. I don't usually use MonoBook so I don't know how recent this problem is but I suspect it was caused by edits by Krinkle to MediaWiki:Editnotice-notext or a related page in response to this section. It doesn't happen if there is an edit notice, for example for https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_EDA_software&action=edit&useskin=monobook. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:37, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Fixed the font-size problem in Template:Editnotice load/notext/core. Krinkle (talk) 22:52, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

    Citoid

    Citoid, the automagic citation filling tool, is on its way at last. It's been up at the French and Italian Wikipedias for a while, with positive feedback overall. The time isn't firmly settled, but Wednesday evening UTC is most likely.

    Citoid depends upon good TemplateData. Wikipedia:TemplateData/Tutorial explains how to write the basics by hand, but the TemplateData GUI tool is usually faster and easier. It also depends upon external services like Zotero. If your favorite website isn't working, it probably needs a new Zotero entry. The design is less than ideal. There is a book-with-bookmark button for Citoid, next to a now-unlabeled "Cite" menu for filling in citations the old way.

    If you have suggestions on how to improve the design, then please leave your comments where the designers are most likely to see them, at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. If you have any other suggestions or run into problems, then please leave feedback at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. If you would like to see Citoid at another wiki, then you may make that request in Phabricator: by creating a new task under the "Citoid" project. Most requests will probably not be granted for the next couple of weeks, but evidence that TemplateData is current on your main citation templates will likely improve your chances.

    Here at the English Wikipedia, you will need to opt-in to VisualEditor via Beta Features to see Citoid. Pre-deployment testing can be done here on Beta Labs. (Before you ask: yes, after getting all the bumps smoothed out, the plan is to make it available in the wikitext editor as well. However, that will likely not be for some months yet.)

    Happy editing, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:14, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

    Update: This is being delayed for a few days. Monday (late) is the most likely time now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:49, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    Also, is anyone here involved in Zotero? Their BBC and Google Books descriptors are out of date. I think that the BBC News website may have been rearranged last week. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:26, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    Latest word: This isn't going to happen until Labs is happy again. However, the schedule is looking like maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. Citoid is likely to appear here pretty shortly after Coren gives the all-clear on Labs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:39, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    It's up. Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:20, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    Weird deletion display error

    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T94012
    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T92046

    For some reason I can't view Forever (U.S. TV series) as it keeps coming up with this error

    The revision #0 of the page named "Forever (U.S. TV series)" does not exist.

    This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted. Details can be found in the deletion log.

    And there is nothing in the deletion log. I have tried purging the page with no result. Simply south ...... sitting on fans for just 8 years 23:03, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

    It works for me. Is it the url https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_%28U.S._TV_series%29 which produces MediaWiki:Missing-revision? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:05, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    In the past couple of days I have seen this multiple times at Germanwings Flight 9525 and once at Ferguson unrest. The workaround is to revert the last edit. In the latter case, the article was out of service for one hour and 16 minutes because the last editor didn't know what to do about it. Definitely not a freak accident and needs attention. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:59, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    Have noticed this on about a dozen articles over the last few days. Not sure where to escalte this one. Amortias (T)(C) 19:39, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    I'm guessing it needs a report on Phabricator, but I don't know how to do that. PrimeHunter? ―Mandruss ☎ 21:28, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    Please see mw:How to report a bug. --89.176.96.33 (talk) 22:09, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    This bug just struck me while editing United States House of Representatives elections, 1860 – reverting my edit seemed to fix the problem. So, whatever this bug is, it isn't fixed yet... Any word on anyone figuring out what this bug is, and when it might be fixed? TIA... --IJBall (talk) 02:23, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Is this filed at Phabricator? If not, it's unlikely to receive attention from developers. — This, that and the other (talk) 07:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Yes, phab:T94012. --HHill (talk) 09:33, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Really weird

    I have been working on List of Recently, My Sister is Unusual episodes and was about to submit more info when this message appeared "The revision #0 of the page named "List of Recently, My Sister is Unusual episodes" does not exist.

    This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted. Details can be found in the deletion log."

    The deletion log has no record of the page being deleted [91]. There a reason for the message? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:16, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    See #Weird deletion display error above. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:18, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks, I reverted my edit and replaced the data that I copied just in case and have no issue now. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:20, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Homo ergaster

    What's wrong with the article of Homo ergaster?

    The revision #0 of the page named "Homo ergaster" does not exist.

    This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted. Details can be found in the deletion log. And nothing was found in deletion log.

    [92]

    — HenryLi (Talk) 05:13, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    I purged the article and it fixed it. Not sure what caused the error. Killiondude (talk) 05:15, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    Weird, it seems that this is occurring more often lately. Mentioned this one in the ticket where this been reported a few times more this month. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:16, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    How do new features get implemented?

    I've been on Wikipedia for a long time, but have no knowledge of the technical things that go on behind the scenes. Recently, I had the thought that it would be nice to get e-mail notifications whenever specific articles on my watchlist are edited. A feature similar to this already exists, but it only works for the watchlist as a whole - pretty much useless, considering the vast number of articles that I'm watching and the small fraction of them that I would actually want to receive e-mails for. I went to the Help Desk to ask about this and was told that it's a perennial proposal. Then I came across this page [93] on phabricator (a website that I have no familiarity with) and was shocked to discover that requests for this feature date all the way back to 2006! So naturally, I'm wondering why nothing like this has been implemented yet. Another editor that I've talked with expressed the opinion that it wouldn't actually be all that hard for someone to design, if only someone would put in the time of doing so. Which leads me to the question - how do new features get selected to be worked on? Do individual editors just design whatever features they feel like working on, or is there a group of some sort that establishes a consensus on what the project will be? I'd really like to see this feature become a reality, but am worried that another decade might pass before that happens. If there's some process that I could go through to support this feature, I'd like to do so, but am unsure what could be done. --Jpcase (talk) 22:12, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Here's a possible workaround:
    1. Create a second account for maintenance (It's legit to do so provided you declare each account on the other's user page. See WP:VALIDALT for the do's and don't's)
    2. Create a small watchlist on one account and have it emailed
    3. Create a big watchlist on the other account and don't have it emailed

    hth, @Jpcase SageGreenRider (talk) 22:27, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    @SageGreenRider: Thanks SageGreenRider. Someone actually made that suggestion to me at the Help Desk already. Apparently, once an e-mail is sent for a page, no more e-mails will be sent for it, until I've looked at that page through the account that is signed up for the e-mail notifications. Since I have no interest in actually using an alternative account, it would be a bit of a bother to have sign in and out of two different accounts just to keep getting e-mails. --Jpcase (talk) 22:36, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    If it's easier for you (I suspect it wouldn't be) to change browser than to sign in and out then you could have another browser which uses "Keep me logged in (for up to 30 days)" to always be logged in to the second account. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:58, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    OK, @Jpcase, how about you set up your email inbox so that it puts the email from wikipedia into a low priority folder if it doesn't contain important keywords and a high priority folder if it does contain the keywords/article names you care about? SageGreenRider (talk) 23:01, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    @PrimeHunter: @SageGreenRider: Thanks PrimeHunter and SageGreenRider for your suggestions. I may try one of those ideas, but would still like to see the above-mentioned feature implemented. Do either of you know who would be responsible for seeing something like this designed? Is it just up to individual editors to decide what they want to design? Or would there be a specific group that takes on these issues? --Jpcase (talk) 23:06, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    @Jpcase Sorry, I don't know it works. My guess would be people just work on things that a) they have the skill set for and b) they find useful themselves. SageGreenRider (talk) 23:18, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    ...by the way, risking lapsing into cyber-psychology here, I'm reminded of a story attributed to the Buddha, something like this: "A red-faced farmer runs up to a group of monks and says 'Have my cows come this way? They broke the pasture fence and trampled all my sesame plants and escaped. I'm ruined. Have you seen them?' The head monk says 'Sorry, no, we've seen no cows all day' The farmer runs off shouting madly. The head monk says to the other monks 'Be thankful you have no cows. Be thankful you have no sesame fields. The farmer has made his own Hell' My point (and I do have one) is that maybe you are being a tad obsessive about your watchlist and you've "made your own Hell" so to speak. Why not forget the email thing, trim down your watchlist, and just look at recent changes when you log in? hth SageGreenRider (talk) 23:40, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Because people sort of expect me to show up at certain pages whenever they post. The feature he'd like would be helpful to me, at least until WP:Flow creates a decent feed (to serve up all the discussions wanting my attention on a silver platter one page  ;-). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:42, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    It's only Wikipedia. Feel free to disappoint those people. ;-) SageGreenRider (talk) 23:52, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    @SageGreenRider: Thanks for the sage advice Sage. ;) You're probably right that I should cut down my watchlist, but the main reason that I'm wanting an option for article-specific e-mail notifications, is so that if I'm waiting for a response from someone on a talk page, I won't have to actually check in on Wikipedia to know when they've gotten back to me - rather, I could just check my smartphone to see if I have any new e-mails. It would make it much easier for me to move my mind onto other things.
    Anyways, I registered at phabricator, left a message there, and lo and behold - someone actually said that they've decided to start working on it. So we'll see what happens. :) --Jpcase (talk) 00:55, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    Ok good luck, but I'm merely the owner of a sage green bicycle, not a sage per se. SageGreenRider (talk) 01:06, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    To answer the original question, Mediawiki (the software that runs Wikipedia) is maintained by a mixture of volunteers and staff paid by the Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to keeping the site running, the WMF staff tend to focus more on big tasks and long-term goals. Hence the development they lead tends to be more big picture. Smaller changes are more often made by volunteers poking at things. Anyone can Become a Mediawiki Hacker, assuming you know (or can learn) PHP, Mediawiki's code conventions, and associated things. Anyone can submit potential changes to the codebase, which are handled through git / gerrit [94], and then developers discuss changes and incorporate the good ones into what we actually run. Discussion of bugs and feature requests generally happens on phabricator [95], on mailing lists (e.g. wikitech-l), or on IRC. See developer hub for more info on contacting developers. However, unless you can do the development yourself, or convince a volunteer to do it for you, then you probably won't see the changes you hope for any time soon. Dragons flight (talk) 04:15, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    This request in particular is one of the many tasks that are 'in between'. Too big for a single developer to take on (most definitely considering return value), too small and insignificant for the WMF to take on (they deal with much bigger problems). That basically makes it end up in the waiting chamber, where it will probably be until either we have an excess of resources (unlikely :) ) or a very determined volunteer who wants this for himself.
    Also remember that there are always thousands of bugs and feature requests in hundreds of subprojects open at any one time, and that many of this are 'super tasks', that still need to be split into a couple more micro tasks, before they will be solved.
    The oldest task is currently from October 2004, but that is probably because dates were not imported from the system that was used before 2004. We regularly solve issues that have been requested some 6 years ago. Over the last 3 months, I myself have been steadily making progress on getting ajax previews for the edit page working, something for which every wiki has a gadget, and that was blocked in core for multiple years for various reasons. Due to investments of teams like VisualEditor etc, into the core of MediaWiki some of these blockers are starting to disappear and the functionality suddenly becomes 'feasible' to add for a little volunteer developer like me. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    Toolserver down?

    Whenever I click a Toolserver-based coordinates feature, I end up at a blank white page with my browser constantly indicating that it's waiting or trying to load a page; this has happened both in IE11 and in whatever the latest edition of Firefox is. It's not the same as the OSM error that I reported a few days ago: yes, clicking the OSM link in {{GeoGroupTemplate}} at User:Nyttend/Pennsylvania NRHP/Westmoreland results in this blank white page, but I get the same result whenever I click on a single coordinates tag (for example, this link for the Bells Mills bridge at the Westmoreland list, the coords immediately below "West of Yukon"), even though the resulting page is a general Toolserver page and not something dependent on OSM. What could be wrong? Maybe I'm just sleepy (past 2AM here; I'm normally asleep well before now), but it seems like a weird malfunction. Nyttend (talk) 06:12, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    I think it is down and has been all day. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 06:39, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    But things were working fine "earlier", i.e. at least as late as midnight my time. Until I finished what I was doing, and began closing tabs, I had several tabs running with Toolserver-placed coordinates from earlier in the evening. Nyttend (talk) 06:43, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    Nyttend There was a scheduled maintenance on March 30 at 22:00 UTC. Let's just say things didn't go well. Things are still down and as of a posting one hour ago, they are still working on it. FYI... it is WMFLabs and not Toolserver. Please don't sully Toolserver's good name by confusing it with WMFLabs :) Bgwhite (talk) 07:14, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    Latest email says things are back up and working now. Bgwhite (talk) 07:40, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    I probably shouldn't ask this

    This is probably one of those Beans type questions, but what, exactly, would happen if someone made bots to work at cross-purposes to each other, and then tried to run them at the same time? Like, say, someone made a bot to go around and change all instances of British spelling to American spelling, and another bot to change all instances of American spelling to British spelling? Would that crash the servers or shut down the site or something? ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 06:38, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    See the "(Ro)bot wars" section of Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars. Nyttend (talk) 06:46, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    Amusing, but I think a little different, as the choice between British and American spelling impacts every single page in the encyclopedia, meaning billions of words on over five million pages (counting project and talk space), not just two bots edit warring over the sandbox. I was wondering if that type of thing would cause a server crash the way deleting the main page or deleting the sandbox does. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 07:05, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    No problem. Anything can be blocked. Accounts would be first, if need be, sysadmins would block the traffic on the servers. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:38, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    How do I import a reference from wikidata?

    How do I get the reference from wikidata? Lion have the population {{#property:P1082}} and it looks like the reference for this is P854, but {{#property:P854}} gives nothing if I preview it on Lion (P1082 gives 491,268±1). Christian75 (talk) 13:35, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    I would answer this question but I can see no property P1082 on the listed Wikidata page (which is the one for lion). --Izno (talk) 14:04, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Izno: - Thank you. I messed up. It shouldnt have been Lion but Lyon (the town). A rewrite my question here:
    How do I get the reference from wikidata? d:Lyon have the population {{#property:P1082}} and it looks like the reference for this is P854, but {{#property:P854}} gives nothing if I preview it on Lyon (P1082 gives 491,268±1). Christian75 (talk) 13:35, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    Okay, so the only way that I know of to access the reference is to use Lua to get the entirety of the object's claims, and then use the same Lua code to select the reference of the particular element. I believe this would require a Lua module, probably built on Module:Wikidata. I'm not familiar enough with Lua at this time to help further. --Izno (talk) 15:16, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    Parser function to determine if an image is on Commons?

    I have a great disdain for the template {{Keep local}}. Among my (innumerable) problems with the template is that it says that the image might be on Commons with the same filename when, for the overwhelming majority of images that use the template, the Commons image does not actually exist. Is there any way that we could suppress the link from showing up if a Commons image with that filename does not actually exist? Some kind of #ifexist for detecting whether the page exists at Commons? --B (talk) 14:42, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Use {{#ifexist:Media:...}} instead of {{#ifexist:File:...}} to determine whether a file (as opposed to a local file page) exists at a title. For example, File:Example.svg is a Commons file without local description page, so {{#ifexist:Media:Example.svg|exists|doesn't exist}} returns "exists" while {{#ifexist:File:Example.svg|exists|doesn't exist}} returns "doesn't exist". SiBr4 (talk) 16:31, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    The above method cannot detect whether a given file is a local file, a Commons file or both, though, so it won't be usable for the {{keep local}} template. SiBr4 (talk) 19:24, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    You are supposed to use {{keep local|file name on Commons}} if the file is available somewhere on Commons. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:21, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    There are several cases and what would be nice would be to have them completely separated:
    1. Images that are not on Commons and never should be on Commons because they are copyrighted in their country of origin. These should not be using keeplocal at all - there's a different template for that.
    2. Images that would not be useful on Commons because they are someone's user page files or something else that is useless anywhere but this particular wiki. Again, this template should not even be used for those.
    3. Images that are not (yet) on Commons, but would be legitimate for moving there.
    4. Images that actually are on Commons, but the uploader has asked that a local copy be kept here (for whatever reason).
    There is some benefit to be gained from having these four groups of images categorized separately. Well, there's no way that the template is going to fix #1 and #2. But there would be at least some benefit to the template (a) being able to put #4 in its own category and (b) not showing a link to a Commons image and telling the user it "might" exist, when it actually does not exist. --B (talk) 03:06, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    The "Media:" trick could be used to give an error for non-existing files, but files that exist locally but not on Commons would give false negatives. I don't think there is a better currently available method to check for non-existing files though. SiBr4 (talk) 20:22, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    Red dot of love wont go

    See also: Wikipedia talk:Notifications § Red box

    The notifications red dot doesn't go after I click on it. Anyone else have this issue? Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:04, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

    What OS/browser are you using? --Izno (talk) 19:41, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    Firefox. But now I've clicked on Preferences (didn't change anything, just clicked on it), the problem has gone. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:01, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    I had this yesterday as well (I think it was yesterday). It went away for me too after I clicked on preferences. I'm also on Firefox (36), and I'm using Ubuntu. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:00, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    Clicking on preferences worked for me too. --HHill (talk) 14:02, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    Notifications red box not clearing after clicking to look at them

    Normally, the red box clears after I look at the notifications, but starting sometime today, after clicking on the box, it doesn't clear. I've rebooted Firefox and did Ctrl-R, to no avail. Is anyone else noticing this? Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 21:41, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    Clicking on Preferences worked for me too. Crazy. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 23:32, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    Notifications number is stuck

    I woke up this morning and had two notifications, one for a 'thanks' and one for a talk message, but no matter what I do it continues to show that I have two new notifications, and when I click on the number it just shows me the old notifications. The yellow box that says "you have new messages" went away when I checked.

    I don't believe this is related but I also received two Wikipedia emails from two different new users, explaining or asking about edits of theirs I had reverted. I get Wikipedia emails very rarely so I don't know why two people at once suddenly decided to use that option, their emails were polite and didn't contain any particularly private information. — Jeraphine Gryphon (talk) 08:47, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    I think I saw someone say you can fix that by clicking Preferences. I could be wrong, but it might be worth a try while you're waiting for someone who actually knows what they're talking about. ―Mandruss ☎ 08:50, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    That worked. o_O Weird... — Jeraphine Gryphon (talk) 08:57, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    Edit summaries in all caps

    Resolved
    WP:FOOLS prank that went too far; mediwiki change was already reverted. — xaosflux Talk 17:29, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

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

    Um, why is every edit summary shouting at me? --NeilN talk to me 00:56, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    Same here, but only when I'm registered. ---Sluzzelin talk 00:57, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    IT'S JUST YOU; I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT.
    (Just kidding...I came here to ask the same question.) postdlf (talk) 00:57, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Just wondering that myself. An April Fools thing? Have we angered the servers? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:59, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    I also see that since a few minutes ago. Looks really bad. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:59, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    (edit conflict) Same here, but it seems to have stopped. I hope it's just as temporary a problem for everyone else. Ian.thomson (talk) 01:00, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Everything does now appear back to normal. That was strange... Nick—Contact/Contribs 01:01, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Right, normality seems to be restored. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:01, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Stopped for me. I fed postdlf to the servers. --NeilN talk to me 01:02, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    This was an April Fools' prank added at MediaWiki:Group-user.css. I've deleted the page. Nakon 01:03, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    I was headed here to report the same problem. But just a second ago everything went back to normal. Perhaps a few microchips were fed to the servers to appease them. MarnetteD|Talk 01:03, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    I want to emphasize a consensus reached years ago that April Fools pranks to the interface are out of bounds. Harej (talk) 01:05, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    I thought it was just me!!!! This had me super confused! I have a screenshot uploading now for those who don't understand. EoRdE6(Come Talk to Me!) 01:08, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    @EoRdE6: Can you please request deletion of the screenshot from Commons? The user whose contributions it depicts is upset. Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:34, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    @Bbb23: So I see... Instead of making this a fiasco, I will go and deal with it there. May be a few hours though, this is commons. EoRdE6(Come Talk to Me!) 01:36, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    • Sorry to be a "party-pooper" here but AFD'ing every article here is one thing but fucking around with the interface is on another level!.... Sorry but I can have a laugh & all that but personally mucking around with stuff like that isn't really that funny.... –Davey2010Talk 01:37, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    YAY!!! Bobherry Talk Edits Happy April Fools Day! 02:44, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    I've given my opinion at MediaWiki talk:Group-user.css and won't retype it here. Btw, Legoktm is responsible for it in case anyone wants to complain to him personally. ekips39 (talk) 02:57, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    Discussing on a talk page of a non-existant MediaWiki interface page is gr8. Killiondude (talk) 03:40, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

    Bullet point size in Safari 8.0.4

    Safari, abnormal sizing
    Firefox, no problems
    Use Media Viewer or the Commons file page for better viewing

    For some reason, on Safari 8.0.4 on Mac OS X 10.10.2 Yosemite (Vector skin, both when logged out and logged in), bullet points display really small. I was expecting the normal bullet points of about 6 pixels in diameter (like in Firefox) but for some reason the displayed bullets have diameter of about 3 pixels. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 10:09, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_135#Bullet_points -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:50, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Quick links: webkit bug, phabricator background

    Edit window text in Safari 8.0.4

    On an unrelated (or perhaps related) note, the size of the text in the edit window is also twice as small as it is in Firefox. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 10:13, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    It has never been different. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:32, 1 April 2015 (UTC)


    User scripts using the old Sajax framework

    Krinkle posted a message on the wikitech-l mailing list regarding the old "Sajax" AJAX framework, which has been deprecated for a very long time now, and is likely to be removed from MediaWiki altogether before the end of the year. Quite a number of (mainly very old) user scripts still use this old JavaScript library.

    There are only two MediaWiki namespace scripts still using Sajax that I can see (MediaWiki:Gadget-dropdown-menus-nonvector.js and MediaWiki:RefToolbarLegacy.js, both of which are nasty-looking old scripts which could use some cleanup). However, the search engine turns up 479 matches in userspace for sajax. So a lot of people need to either update their old user scripts, or get rid of scripts they don't care about anymore.

    I guess my point is, just be aware that Sajax will eventually go away one day, so migrate your user scripts to jQuery before it's too late. See mw:ResourceLoader/Legacy_JavaScript#ajax.js for info. Thanks, — This, that and the other (talk) 09:29, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

    • I brought up this basic issue that most of the wiki's JavaScripts will fail to load by the end of the year when I started adding things to Category:JavaScripts using deprecated elements across multiple wikis by tagging JavaScript talk pages with {{JS migration|done=no}} and got the impression that everyone appears to think it is a "it's not broken don't fix it" situation and no-one wants anyone to go around and fix these scripts (I offered and was declined most everyplace I offered). If there is suddenly interest for someone with the ability to fix these things to go around and start fixing them, I would happily fire AWB back up and start tagging talk pages again for the various things that will cause massive script failures this year. I just got so discouraged with the general consensus that no-one cares, that I have given up (and have been saddened to a point where I have little interest in contributing much at the moment). — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 11:00, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
      • I would say, don't do it on your own. Make a separate taskforce board, have people direct their indifference/anger/enthusiasm/ask for assistance there, instead of your talk page.. Another idea is to try and see if you can change the AWB run in such a way that you can skip user scripts that are very likely not even in use by people. Then you might bother fewer people with stuff that they are not interested in. But if you need a break, take time and return later :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:50, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
        • TheDJ, the template I linked above actually organizes all of the tagged pages. If it is a script that isn't it User: space someplace, it is placed at the top of the queue on the category page. If it is in User: and is not a common.js/skin.js(/global.js on meta), then it is listed next. If it is a common.js/skin.js(/global.js on meta), then it is placed at the very end of the queue so that it is still tagged so those people know there is an issue with their script if they ever come back but there is no rush to fix those scripts and other editors (admins) can decide if they want to fix that level of script or not. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 19:42, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
          • Please do not put {{edit protected}} on pages, if there is no simple copy+paste fix suggestion. If an admin needs more than five seconds to understand and execute a requested edit it was a bogus request flooding the tracking category for good requests. Maybe roll your own template + tracking category for this business, outside of the edit request queue (not as sub-category). The template could be something you can switch into a deletion request later for the final clean-up. –Be..anyone (talk) 07:57, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

    Greenlandic #Babel templates are in Danish

    As someone noticed on Wiktionary a while ago, the Wikimedia #Babel system incorrectly uses Danish rather than Greenlandic for the Greenlandic templates; see e.g. [96], [97]. Both Wiktionary's and Wikipedia's local Babel (no #) templates correctly use Greenlandic (see [98]). The solution seems to be to update translatewiki.net's kl-0 through kl-N pages, but I don't have an account there and the user who initially reported the issue said they didn't have sufficient editing rights to report the problem there even after creating an account. Help? -sche (talk) 11:47, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

    Error message on user page

    I don’t know how long it’s been there, but I just noticed my user page sporting an error message at the top: Error: Page status indicators' name attribute must not be empty. I’m pretty sure it wasn‘t there when I last saved the page in 2013, so I guess it has to do with a template that’s since been modified—but I can’t see any empty “name=” fields in my wikitext, so I’m quite at a loss in identifying the cause and the offending element. Any suggestions as to what’s producing the error or how to fix it?—Odysseus1479 21:25, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    Look at template:top icon template and add a name=something parameter. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:51, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    And how I worked it out is to delete chunks of your user page till the error went away. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:52, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks, @Graeme Bartlett! Believe it or not, that was my prime suspect—but I’d more or less ruled it out because {{Top icon}} makes no mention of a “name” parameter. How did you know to add one, when it’s not described in the documentation—do all templates have a “name” parameter, whether or not it’s explicit? And why was it OK until (?somewhat) recently?—Odysseus1479 22:05, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    If you suspected, you should have tried a preview with it removed yourself! I tried to add a name=graphic parameter because the error message said name was missing. Although it is not in the documentation it is in the source code. Not all templates have a name= parameter, and I don't even know why this is needed for in top icon. I suggest you look at the history, as I know there was an an announcement of a change to top icon recently. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:28, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    The error message MediaWiki:Invalid-indicator-name was caused by a blank assignment name = in #tag in this code in {{top icon}}:
    {{#tag:indicator|...| name = {{{name|{{{id|{{{image|{{{imagename|}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
    name is an undocumented synonym for id in {{top icon}}. The error is produced if {{{name|{{{id|{{{image|{{{imagename|}}}}}}}}}}}} evaluates to blank, i.e. if either none of the four are assigned or if the first of the four to be assigned a value is assigned blank. Assigning name as non-blank was one way to avoid that. Another would have been to remove the blank |id= from the call in User:Odysseus1479. That would have meant the non-blank imagename was used instead. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:31, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    I have warned against a blank |id= in the documentation.[99] PrimeHunter (talk) 22:01, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    I should have caught this before... Anyway, this should no longer generate an error (even though using an empty id makes no sense), but using one is advised regardless. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:28, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T94889

    Am I the only one who sees "Edit links" link on Main page and Recent changes page? noexternallanglinks isn't working? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:51, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    I am pretty sure that is caused by an issue with skin styles. [100] We have a fix for it now and it will be deployed soon. Aude (talk) 19:04, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    Looked at it more and think it's another issue, but probably can get it fixed shortly. Aude (talk) 19:10, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    Have a patch to fix this and now waiting for someone to review it. Aude (talk) 20:13, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

    Special:Preferences looking weird?

    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T93050

    Is it just me, or is Special:Preferences looking a bit weird right now? The tabs of settings have somehow disappeared and turned into a list of bullets, like this:

    • User profile
    • Appearance
    • Editing
    • Recent changes
    • Watchlist
    • Gadgets
    • Notifications
    • Beta features

    I have this issue on both Chrome and Firefox. Tony Tan98 · talk 01:00, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    It looks the same as ever to me. Cache issue? SageGreenRider (talk) 02:34, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    It's been fixed, somehow. :) Tony Tan98 · talk 02:42, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    It also happened to me in Vector at the same time but went back to normal. MonoBook was not affected. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:19, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
    @Tony Tan 98: The tabs at Special:Preferences, like the tabs along the top of any other page, are essentially an unordered HTML list - styled to display as a horizontal row with boxes drawn around each item, rather than a vertical stack of bulleted items. The styling depends upon several CSS and JavaScript files being served with the page proper, and if one of these CSS or JavaScript files fails to be received by your browser, or is corrupted, the styling can be affected. A WP:BYPASS will usually fix it, unless the relevant WikiMedia server is down. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:27, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    This issue is still happening for me and for others. For some reason, it's not an issue on other Wikipedias (e.g. German, Spanish...) and other wikis like Wikidata. But is happening on beta wikipedias [101] Developers are aware and are looking into this. Aude (talk) 09:09, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

    Fixed just now, it was an issue on the WMF side. Apologies for the delay; some "fun" was had tracking this down, the culprit ended up being in code that was thought to be mobile-only. --Roan Kattouw (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

    Simplest, easiest, best way to do exponents

    What is the best, simplest, easiest way to include exponents in articles? {{math|10^7}} doesn't work, and even if it did, the formatting isn't very nice. Maury Markowitz (talk) 19:49, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

    Superscripts? 107 --Redrose64 (talk) 19:54, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Red, the only problem with those is typing in the tags. It's an annoying amount of work, with shifts and its easy to type one thing wrong and the whole page stops rendering. I was hoping there was something simple like the frac template? And if there isn't, maybe there should be? Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:13, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    If you like templates, {{sup}} has the same effect, e.g. 10{{sup|7}} = 107. Personally, I don't think that is easier than the <sup> tags, but you can use it if you do. Dragons flight (talk) 20:17, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    @Maury Markowitz: The <sup></sup> tags don't require any extra typing. Below the edit window, you should see a dropdown menu, make sure that "Wiki markup" is selected there. This offers a variety of commonly-used constructs, and <sup></sup> is between <s></s> and <sub></sub>. Click the tags to insert at current cursor position; alternatively, mark the figures that you wish to superscript, and then click the <sup></sup> link to enclose those figures in the tags. I note that you raised this thread after Dragons flight replied above. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:16, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    <math>10^7</math> produces . This is the standard form used in most articles about math. Superscripts work best for short discussions on talk, etc. — xaosflux Talk 19:59, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Xaos, but it doesn't look good. It renders differently than the rest of the text on the page. And it has all the problems of typing tags into wikitext that sup has too. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:13, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    See also Help:Displaying_a_formula for more then you probably ever wanted to know about this :) — xaosflux Talk 20:11, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    For powers of 10 we also have {{10^}}, e.g. {{10^|7}} to make 107. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:14, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Prime, you nailed it, that is precisely what I was looking for. I still think {{exp|7}} would be a good idea though, because it follows the mold of frac and also you could do {{exp|2|7}} — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maury Markowitz (talk • contribs) 21:21, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    Shouldn't {{exp|x}} produce ? Hawkeye7 (talk) 04:12, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

    I'm trying to figure out how to include (on my project) a template back link like the one seen in this screen shot. I first thought it was included in the {{Documentation/start box}} or {{Documentation/start box2}} wrong, so my next thought was maybe here MediaWiki:Tagline wrong again, is this hard coded in MediaWiki core ? Mlpearc (open channel) 19:47, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

    It is indeed 'hardcoded' in MediaWiki; subpages always show these links to their parent pages. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 20:44, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    • If you want a template to simulate it, that could probably be done. Please give an exact use case and where you want to see it and I'll happily help you figure out what you need. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 21:19, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    If you don't get these links automatically for template subpages in your wiki then maybe the wiki is configured to disable subpages in template space. That sounds like a bad idea. Or maybe you want a link to a page which isn't actually a parent page. Can you give a link to the page missing the link? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:50, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    These links do not show on my project with Mediawiki 1.24.0, guess I should take it to MediaWiki.org. Thanks. Cheers, Mlpearc (open channel) 21:55, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    I believe that they're known as a "breadcrumb trail". --Redrose64 (talk) 22:11, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    Subpages are disabled in template space in your wiki. They are enabled in userspace so you get the backlink at http://mywiki.everythingfoodanddrink.org/wiki/User:Mlpearc/Workshop. The disabling may have been done with mw:Manual:$wgNamespacesWithSubpages in LocalSettings.php, a file in your MediaWiki installation. It is not visible or editable as a wiki page so you may need a developer if you aren't one. I don't see a reason to deliberately disable subpages in template space. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:20, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    Thank you PrimeHunter, Yeah, I'm the only dev on the project (self taught). I thought this would be enabled by default but I'll go through LS.php and check. Thanx again for all your help. Mlpearc (open channel) 22:29, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    Oh, it's apparently only default for template talk and not template. I wonder why. Wikimedia enables it for template with code in http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:35, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    I saw that, it's working fine now thanx everyone. That's funny it's working in CommonSettings.php and not InitialiseSettings.php. Mlpearc (open channel) 22:44, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

    Labs is going to be slow

    Tracked in Phabricator
    Task T93792

    Heads up: NFS on Labs will be slow for a few days, and then will be offline on March 26, 2015 at 22:00 UTC (less than five minutes). I understand that the point is making backups and setting up disaster recovery mechanisms. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:34, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

    This is taking longer than expected. Consequently, you didn't have a five-minute outage 25 minutes ago. Maybe in the morning (North America time). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:27, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
    • I'm not sure exactly what is going on, but tool labs for xtools seems to be completely gone (I tried logging in and it sent me to bastion instead of tools (yes, I know)). The tool is still there, but completely refuses to run due to whatever is going on. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 22:31, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

    hi, I asked technical 13 and cyberpowers, and haven't gotten a response so im asking here, the "history revision statistics" link is not working,can anyone help? thank you--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 16:55, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

    XTools again

    no webservice, again, for Xtools --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 18:34, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

    See #revision history statistics link

    Ditto #Labs is going to be slow

    Some users appear to be using User talk:Technical 13 to report these issues. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:24, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Which is fine by me, as a maintainer, of course. I've also seen reports on User talk:Cyberpower678, which is fine too of course (as I watch that page as well). I'll have a much better internet connection tomorrow, and will work on coordinating with @Cyberpower678, Nakon, and MusikAnimal: (other xTools maintainers) and touch base with @Coren and YuviPanda: (labs admins) to see what's going on with the labs change where we are as xTools group getting moved into our own instance. I apologize for any inconveniences caused by this outage, and will try to get everything back up as soon as humanly possible. Thank you for your patience. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 19:37, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks for being on top of things, T13. I trust youse Labs guys will make us happy asap. --Mareklug talk 02:32, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    Soon and very soon

    Looking at e-mail, the "brief service interruption" was an hour or two ago. However, there were some problems. Coren and his team are on it. The first sign that it's working again will be that it's working for you. The second sign that it's all working again will be an announcement (maybe here, maybe in wikitech-l or one of the other mailing lists).

    I don't expect it to be much longer. (This may be your cue to post a link to the Dilbert strip about the impossibility of predicting how long it will take to fix an unknown number of bugs.  ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

    This has apparently been fixed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:17, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

    False warnings from db-u1 template

    Template {{db-u1}} has started to display its red "Warning: This page was last edited by a user other than the owner of the userspace in which it was used" notice even when actually placed by the real owner. I have encountered two three instances this morning. JohnCD (talk) 11:30, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    Please give an example, even if you only know one where the page has been deleted. A test at User:PrimeHunter/sandbox doesn't display the warning. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:26, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    User:TSRL/sandbox/Caudron C.140 and User:Umais Bin Sajjad/sandbox3. JohnCD (talk) 12:44, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    The warning is made by {{#ifeq:{{ROOTPAGENAME}}|{{REVISIONUSER}}||'''Warning: This page was last edited by a user other than the owner of the userspace in which it was used. Please make sure the page was tagged by the correct user before deleting. '''}}. It hasn't been edited recently and should work as far as I can tell. Did it happen at the normal /wiki/ url and not a preview? I don't know why it would happen at a normal page view in your examples. Do you remember the user or time in the statement like "This page was last edited by PrimeHunter (contribs | logs) at 12:24 UTC (45 minutes ago)"? If it happens again then please copy this statement here without deleting the page. I realize somebody else may delete it and you shouldn't edit it to tell others not to delete it. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:21, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    Sorry, I don't remember what that statement said. The warning occurred in normal view when I clicked on the pages in the speedy deletion queue. You can still see it in preview mode if you look at the last revision before deletion in the examples I linked. No U1s in the queue at the moment, I'll keep an eye open. JohnCD (talk) 14:01, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    If you preview a page then {{REVISIONUSER}} returns your own name so the warning will always be displayed in a preview, unless you are viewing a page in your own userspace where {{ROOTPAGENAME}} also returns your username. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:20, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    JohnCD and PrimeHunter, see User:Nyttend/TESTING. This is definitely a malfunctioning template. Please don't delete the page yet; please wait until I ask for it. Nyttend (talk) 15:57, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    That's odd - I was just coming to say it must have been a temporary glitch, because I made a test page from an alternate account which behaved normally, and I have since had a live one from CAT:CSD with no problem. JohnCD (talk) 16:00, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    I just opened a new tab to view it (no edits have been made since I left a note here), and the warning's gone. No explanation that I can see. Nyttend (talk) 16:07, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    For me it doesn't display the warning and it correctly says: "This page was last edited by Nyttend (contribs | logs) at 15:57 UTC (10 minutes ago)". What does it say for you? Caching means the time may look wrong but don't worry about that. I wonder whether some servers don't have access to the right value of {{REVISIONUSER}}, but it's hard to say if nobody seeing the error reports what it says. The html source says "Parsed by mw1050" for me. If anybody sees the warning then PLEASE report what it says below, and also in the html source if you know how to see that in your browser. In many browsers you can do a Ctrl+f search on "Parsed by" when you view the html source. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:10, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    When I first created the page, it gave a big Warning: This page was last edited by a user other than the owner of the userspace in which it was used. Please make sure the page was tagged by the correct user before deleting. I then edited it to fix the {{ambox}}, and the warning was the same. Nyttend (talk) 16:25, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    Here's another: User:Varant Dndlian. Message just says "This page was last edited at 16:10 UTC (0 seconds ago)" without mentioning a user. JohnCD (talk) 16:15, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    For me it didn't display the warning and said "This page was last edited by Varant Dndlian (contribs | logs) at 16:10 UTC (8 minutes ago)". It has since been deleted. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:21, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    I just now created User:Nyttend/TESTING 2 and got the same situation. The template begins with the ordinary "This user page may meet..." and concludes with "...that has been moved. See CSD U1. Warning: This page was last edited by a user other than the owner of the userspace in which it was used. Please make sure the page was tagged by the correct user before deleting.

    If this user page does not meet the criteria for speedy deletion, please remove this notice. This page was last edited at 16:26 UTC (0 seconds ago)" Note that it doesn't know who tagged it! I don't know what to do to fix the situation. Nyttend (talk) 16:28, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    TESTING seems to be ok for me, while TESTING2 is still broken and does not mention who edited the page last, just the time. KonveyorBelt 16:52, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    I looked at TESTING2 and it still showed the red warning: then I purged it (using the clock/purge gadget), the red warning disappeared and the message changed to "This page was last edited by Nyttend..." JohnCD (talk) 18:46, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    "(0 seconds ago)" indicates the page was rendered at the original save and has not been purged since. {{db-meta}} only displays who last edited it if {{REVISIONUSER}} is non-blank: {{#if: {{REVISIONUSER}} | by [[{{ns:2}}:{{REVISIONUSER}}|{{REVISIONUSER}}]] <small>{{toolbar|1=[[Special:Contributions/{{REVISIONUSER}}|contribs]]|2=[[Special:Log/{{REVISIONUSER}}|logs]]}}</small> }}. So the problem is apparently that {{REVISIONUSER}} can be blank. We could consider coding {{db-u1}} to only display the warning if {{REVISIONUSER}} is both non-blank and different from {{ROOTPAGENAME}}. Template talk:Db-meta/Archive 2#Add some magic keywords about the last editor and the last revision and [102] shows the test has always been there, but doesn't mention that it might be blank. Maybe the test was only added originally in 2009 by Church of emacs because the magic word was brand new and not because it was actually expected to sometimes return blank. The possibility isn't mentioned at mw:REVISIONUSER. I edited User:PrimeHunter/sandbox to always display {{REVISIONUSER}}. I got the warning and a blank {{REVISIONUSER}} on the original save. A purge fixed it. If this issue has not been noticed before then maybe it's new that {{REVISIONUSER}} can fail on the original save. If somebody sees the warning on a page which does not say "(0 seconds ago)" then please report what it says, including a username if it's displayed. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:58, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
    Deep down, {{db-user}} invokes Module:Message box. I suspect that this shares a problem with {{asbox}}-based templates (i.e. stubs), where a double save is normally necessary to categorise the page correctly. That is, when I created these seven stubs, they correctly showed cats in the box at the bottom, but on following those links to the cat page, the templates were not listed there. Performing a WP:NULLEDIT on the new template fixed it (this is not a new problem, see Template talk:Asbox#Categorization of stub tags doesn't work on creation). So, if a user adds {{db-user}} and gets that red error message, does it disappear if they WP:NULLEDIT the page? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:03, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    I just encountered another example at User:Dodger67/Sandbox/Link-ZA. The message was "This page was last edited at 21:09 UTC (0 seconds ago)". When I purged the page (with the clock/purge gadget) the red warning disappeared and the message changed to "This page was last edited by Dodger67 (contribs | logs) at 21:09 UTC (4 minutes ago)"

    There is certainly something new going on here. I have been doing U1 deletions for years and have never encountered this message before (except where the requester really was a different account), but today it is happening all the time. JohnCD (talk) 21:21, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

    I have changed {{Db-u1}} to display "Purge to see last editor" instead of a warning if {{REVISIONUSER}} is blank.[103] PrimeHunter (talk) 11:48, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    Thanks! I can confirm that things are working better now. I recreated User:Nyttend/TESTING with only {{db-u1}} and got the "Purge to see last editor" upon creation, and when I purged, the warning disappeared; all is well. I then went to the userspace of my public-computer sock and created User:Nyttend backup/TESTING; again the purge message appeared, and when I purged, the big red warning properly appeared. Nyttend (talk) 12:28, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    @PrimeHunter: Thanks, that works. I have deleted five live U1s today, three with the "Purge" message (which without your fix would presumably have been showing the red warning) and two without. Do we know why this problem suddenly appeared yesterday? It must have been caused by some change in the underlying system? JohnCD (talk) 21:13, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
    Might this be related to #Weird deletion display error? Nil Einne (talk) 12:58, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    Possibly - at any rate, it also seems to have been a one-off event, as since then I have deleted several more U1 pages, but none have had the "Purge" notice which would have indicated a recurrence of the problem. JohnCD (talk) 17:34, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    No, I spoke too soon - I had another one with the "purge" message just now, User:Zackmann08/Springfield. JohnCD (talk) 21:42, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
    And several more today, including a large batch from one user of which about half showed the "Purge" message. JohnCD (talk) 13:35, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

    Edit toolbar: Adding embedded file: "thumb" or "thumbnail"?

    When I add a file using the "embedded file" button on the Edit toolbar, the default size option added is "thumbnail". An editor has just changed that to "thumb" in an article I've edited. Looking at Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Images#Image_syntax, "thumb" is used, though I see that Wikipedia:Extended_image_syntax, after initially showing "thumb" as the word to use, then refers to ""thumb" (or "thumbnail"...)". It looks as if the RefToolbar is offering the less preferred word here: could it be changed so it adds "thumb", please?

    I raised this at Help_talk:Edit_toolbar#Thumb_or_Thumbnail.3F and was advised to come here. Can anyone help? PamD 22:57, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

    RefToolbar is a gadget that adds a citation inserter into the toolbar, it has nothing to do with this. Furthermore, I'm a tad conflicted on this. On the one hand, thumb is the de-facto standard that we use. On the other hand, we (as developers and as a community) have been trying to get away from 'lingo' and shorthand notations for a long while now. This is why 'thumbnail' is marked as the default, and 'thumb' as the alias for the thumbnail option. To change that, in my opinion would be a mistake. I'd love to hear more opinions on this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:46, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
    For future reference, this is defined by the order translatable magicword names in ./languages//messages/MessagesEn.php: 'img_thumbnail' => array( 1, 'thumbnail', 'thumb' ), —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:48, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

    Finding all my deleted images

    Over the years I have had a number of images I uploaded deleted as copyvios even though they were made by federal labs. Now I have found an unequivocal statement that these images are, as anyone would have imagined in the first place, indeed covered by PD-gov. So I would like to bring these photos back, and move them to the commons. Can anyone suggest a method of finding them all and doing this easily? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:37, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

    Deleted file names are visible to non-admins at [104]. If no current file has that name then the name is red. The actual file and file page can only be seen and restored by admins. You could compile a list and post to Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:56, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
    PrimeHunter, worked like a champ, thanks! Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:42, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
    Not so unequivocal. MM probably has in mind this language: "the U.S. government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce these documents, or allow others to do so, ...}. But note the continuation: "for U.S. government purposes. All documents available from this server may be protected under the U.S. and Foreign Copyright Laws. Permission to reproduce may be required." [Emphasis added.] See additional comments at Template talk:PD-USGov-DOE#Is any of this correct?. Seems like it would be good to have this clarified by someone knowledgable about copyright. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:04, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

    Possibility of adding categories based on lack of template

    Is it possible for a template to add a category based on the presence (or lack of presence) of another template? POTD has several images which haven't been run despite being old enough to be run, and I'd like to have a category like Category:Featured pictures that haven't been on the main page to track them. I was thinking of having a parameter in Template:FeaturedPicture to look for Template:picture of the day and then add the category if it's not present. (A bot could do this, too, I guess, but a parameter would fail less often).  — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:32, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

    A template does not have the understanding of a completely separate template on the same page (i.e., when one is not embedded in the other). Is Template:picture of the day usually embedded in Template:FeaturedPicture on a file page? --Izno (talk) 16:34, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
    As for bots, yes, a bot could track this. A report could also be set up at WP:DBR (though apparently most of the reports presently listed at DBR are broken per Toolserver's shutdown and have not been updated to run on Labs). --Izno (talk) 16:40, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
    • First question: no, they're always included separately.
    Second comment: I'm loathe to depend on bots... maybe for a one-off task, okay, but recently bot-centric stuff at FAC and FLC has been a mess. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 16:45, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
    You could use Wikipedia:CatScan to find file pages which are in Category:Featured pictures but not in Category:Wikipedia Picture of the day files. I got 1675 files. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:56, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
    The "Linked from" filters seem to be inactive (they're formatted as "strikethrough"), so not directly. However, CatScan can exclude multiple categories, so if you (or a bot) add(s) the pictures from POTD/Unused to a dedicated category, you could then use that category to limit the results of the scan. -- Jokes_Free4Me (talk) 18:06, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
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