Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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

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Possibility of forcing rollback to V10

It seems probable that Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Rollback of Vector 2022 will result in a consensus to at least temporarily rollback to Vector 2010. However, to my knowledge, the WMF has not indicated that they would respect such a consensus if it were found, which would leave us in a situation similar to that with VisualEditor in 2013. In that case, it was possible to implement a hack that overrode the Foundation's changes. Do you code wizards have any idea if something like that would be possible here, and if so, what kinds of technical consequences we might be looking at? (Forcing a rollback would probably require another discussion, but it seems prudent to begin exploring our options, if we have any.) —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 22:45, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

If the WMF refuses to change the skin (Assuming consensus for rollback is found) then any sort of attempt to override V22 and force Vector 2010 would be reverted and the user implementing the change is tempting an office block. Afterall they do have final say on the website they host. Terasail^[✉️] 23:42, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

Anyway, any sort of hack which would force vector 2010 for both logged in and logged out users would be less than ideal and probably be inefficient at best. Terasail^[✉️] 23:50, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

While I think it is very inadvisable, it could be possible to run a gadget that forces a preference change - for logged in users; it has lots of technical problems, starting with: how to skip users that purposefully opted in to v22. Besides, logged in editors can just opt-out if they want to at any time. As IP users don't have preferences, that mechanism can't be used there - there is no good way to do it for them - so it would come down to getting a developer to change the configuration. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:08, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't think a one-time update of everyone's preferences back to V10 would be a major problem—it would be no more intrusive than how V22 was rolled out in the first place—although I agree it would not be particularly useful, either. A rollback would mainly benefit the same users it most seriously impacted in the first place, namely anons. I feel presumptuous asking, as this is so far outside my competence, but there is no way to use to use a snippet in MediaWiki:Common.js to forcibly load the V10 javascript and CSS for users without accounts? Or at least some lines of code that would make V22 look and behave more like V10? I would have thought it would be possible to simply overwrite many elements locally. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 13:41, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

@Compassionate727 to be clear, anons (mostly readers) don't have stored preferences, so we can't do anything script-wise to change their preference. We could potentially do some sort of hacky "run once" on registered users, which would be a headache as new users registered and continue to get V22 as their default. The biggest challenge about readers is that they get cached pages. (A client-side sort of hack is to rewrite every page load with a useskin=vector parameter) As far as CSS hack arounds, if we want it for everyone that is in V22 we could change the CSS in the site wide vector-2022.css file or do some sort of opt-out default gadget. This may also fail due to page caching for readers. I think these sort of expensive hacks for readers would at best provide an inconsistent page viewing experience. The right way to do to this is certainly to change the site skin default server-side. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:14, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

@Xaosflux, I think Alexis Jazz wrote a script for this, User:Alexis Jazz/SkinEnforcer. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:50, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

I think it is pretty safe to say there is no way we'd try a hack like that for all readers here. Some of these things that seem OK in isolation can become huge problems when multiplied by every read on one of the largest websites in the world! A "threat" of some sort of hack like that could possibly convince WMF sysadmins to allow the change or run in to WP:SUPERPROTECT territory again if it got that far. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:05, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

@Compassionate727 I didn't explicitly choose the 2022 skin, but I like it much better than the 2010 skin. At this point, I wouldn't want it reverted without my acquiescence. David10244 (talk) 04:47, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Compassionate727 You seem to be assuming that the majority of anons don't like the new skin. Do you have any evidence for that? Maybe 75% of anons like the new one better. David10244 (talk) 04:58, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@David10244: Do you have any evidence that 75% of anons prefer V2022? I've not seen any, and that would be worth mentioning at the RfC. Regardless, I am not assuming anything, only exploring options. A forced rollback would require another discussion (one that would probably fail unless it could be done cleanly), and before any of that is even relevant, we first need to see how the current RfC closes and how the WMF reacts. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 13:29, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Compassionate727 No, I don't have evidence, and that's my point. Some commenters here seem to be convinced that most readers and editors dislike V2022, including anons. I can't figure out where that impression is coming from; just because many of those commenting here don't like it, that says nothing about the greater population of readers and editors. David10244 (talk) 08:09, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

This is all rendered moot by the fact that Wikipedia's "consensus" system is just a comfortable lie whenever the WMF is involved. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:44, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

It's worth looking into the technical matter of whether we could change the default configuration for registered and/or anonymous editors. If not, then the other questions are irrelevant. If we could, the next question is whether we should. A rogue admin doing so unilaterally might, and probably should, be blocked, but if there is a consensus to revert by technical means then things get more interesting. Blocking someone for implementing a community consensus might lose that community's support on a much broader level. Certes (talk) 10:16, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Crazy question, have we or WMF bothered to ask the readers what they think? I assume not, we are just operating under the premise that some editors not liking equals readers not liking. Think that's a pretty big leap without any data to support it. Slywriter (talk) 14:19, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

@Slywriter Right; I replied just above that I like the 2022 skin better than the 2010 skin, even though I did not explicitly choose either one. Many of the vocal users obviously don't like 2022, and the more they dislike it, the more vocal they are likely to be about disliking it, and agitating for it to be rolled back. That's not what I want though. David10244 (talk) 04:52, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Two civilian acquaintances noticed the change and, knowing I'm a Wikian, innocently congratulated me on it. Surprised, I asked a few others, and most had not noticed it even though they read a bit from Wikipedia most every week. None said it was a bad thing. I suppose WMF did a proper rigorous survey, and got the same result. So, if we oldtimer insiders want to see a more complex, more dense screen (we have good reasons for that) then a custom skin is the way for us. Preferably with a quick click to and from the simpler reader look, so we don't lose touch with what the outside world sees. Me, I do more Commons than WP, and use Monobook there since that's an auxiliary service that most outsiders don't know about anyway, so we don't have to worry what they would see. In ENWP I use Vector 2022 with long line option and black screen, which fortunately allows a single click to white screen. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:40, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't believe we have the technical ability to roll it back. We do, however, have the technical ability to roll certain elements back by modifying Common.js and Common.css. It may be worth creating a list of which elements we can roll back; two that I am confident on is full width by default and link colors. BilledMammal (talk) 13:32, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

If we wanted site-wide hacks on vector-2022, we would do so in vector-2022.js / vector-2022.css , not in common.* — xaosflux ^Talk 14:21, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I recently noticed the change and it was annoying for my setups when logged out. For instance, I'll often use Lynx with "-dump" to save an article's current state (or sometimes with oldid for a permlink) to text for my study archives. With the new theme the infoboxes were prominent, the table of contents missing or useless and misformatted, etc. On some GUI but security-enhanced systems, the now-missing left bar menu was working but not the TOC. Getting a "#" anchor was thus annoying. I'm glad that useskin works and if that keeps working it's an acceptable compromise for my use cases. So this VPT thread was useful to me, thanks. —PaleoNeonate – 16:36, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

There isn't much harm in preparing for the worst case scenario and determining what the possibilities would be, but based on an Office Hours Zoom chat I attended with the Foundation, the Web team at least do seem interested in treating the enwiki community fairly and respectfully. They seemed like they had made the original change in good faith, based on an incorrect RFC close taken at face value and hadn't anticipated this response. They also asked a number of questions about the intricacies of working with the community instead of dictating to them, and were interested in what they could do to alleviate our concerns, improve relations and make V22 acceptable to us. I don't think this is the same group of people that had been making the decisions in cases such as the Visual Editor snafu mentioned above or WP:CANSANFRANBANFRAM. While I'm always hesitant when dealing with the Foundation, it seems like they've been trying to engage with us in good faith and we should keep in mind that extending some of that back to them would be helpful. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 19:18, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Update

Just to share an update on this, I have copied two parts of a new statement by SDeckelmann-WMF at WP:RBV22.

• if consensus in this RfC calls for rolling back the software, I recommend that we do that only for existing logged-in editors on the English Wikipedia, while we work to address the key issues.
• In considering the data we have, however, I don’t see a basis for rolling back the skin for logged-out readers, or changing the default width for them (especially now that the fixed width toggle is persistent). I believe this is aligned with the policy at WP:CONEXCEPT on behalf of readers, in the sense that the perspectives of the editor community can only be one of the important inputs to making decisions about readers. I don't think the evidence we have supports rollback for readers, and, on the contrary, the evidence suggests they are receiving the benefits we hoped they would.

Terasail^[✉️] 19:40, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

"Reply" on talk page grayed out

Resolved

Other symptoms: "Loading ..." appears below one post and, when I go to the talk page, it lands where the "Loading ..." appears. Please let me know how to fix this. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:17, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

P.S. - I've shut down my computer and the problem is still present. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:18, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

A new piece of information: the problem is only on one talk page.

I've tried turning off Enable quick replying and the grayed out "Reply" option disappears but the "Loading ..." is still there and when I go that talk page it still lands where the "Loading ..." text appears.

I've turned Enable quick replying back on and when I click on the "Reply" just above the "Loading ..." a blue box appears around the "Reply." Nothing else happens.

Help, please! - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 02:19, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

What browser do you use on what operating system? What page do you experience the problem on? Izno (talk) 02:24, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Your questions caused me to check the page on other browsers. No problem. I went back to my primary browser and emptied cashe. Now, no problem. Thank you so much for sending me on the path to a solution! - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 02:38, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, that's good. :) Izno (talk) 02:47, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Detect category additions with python

Is there a way to query the API to check additions to a category? Special:RelatedChanges can do it, but I couldn't find an API for it, and the alternative is feedwatchlist, which requires watchlisting the category. A way built into pywikibot would be preferable. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:54, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

T17552 is the task for creating an API for related changes. You can get recent category changes from mw:API:RecentChanges with rctype=categorize. It isn't for a specific category though. The pywikibot equivalent It can't filter for a specific category, but the pywikibot method is is site.recentchanges(changetype="categorize"). — JJMC89 (T·C) 00:57, 16 February 2023 (UTC) edited 02:02, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@JJMC89, looks like wikitech:Event Platform/EventStreams also works:

stream = EventStreams(streams=['recentchange'], since='20190111')
stream.register_filter(server_name='en.wikipedia.org', type='categorize')

I intermittently get warnings like:

WARNING: Could not load json data from
{"$schema":"/mediawiki/recentchange/1.0.0","meta":​{"uri":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huts,_Shellbeach_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4397431.jpg","request_id":"57b03ef8-880c-4c5d-9383-8d78de816986","id":"5edb874d-d6af-48fe-80e2-c32790858c48","dt":"2023-02-09T10:33:58Z","domain":"commons.wikimedia.org","stream":"mediawiki.recentchange","topic":"eqiad.mediawiki.recentchange","partition":0,"offset":4522460226}​,"id":2114823567,"type":"edit","namespace":6,"title":"File:Huts, Shellbeach - geograph.org.uk - 4397431.jpg","comment":"/* wbeditentity-update-languages-and-other-short:0||en */ Adding structured data to this newly uploaded geograph.org.uk image","t
Unterminated string starting at: line 1 column 660 (char 659)

— Qwerfjkltalk 11:58, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

The since parameter only works if you provide a date within the last 7 days or so. – SD0001 (talk) 17:38, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

@SD0001, yes, I just copied that from the example. That's not what's causing the error, though. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:49, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm guessing that you are using a bad version (0.0.23+) of sseclient.[1] Installing pywikibot with the eventstreams extra, it will install sseclient<0.0.23,>=0.0.18. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:02, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

You can get recent changes in a specific category with the recentchanges API by filling in rctitle. Nardog (talk) 16:01, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

I worded that poorly (now updated). The pywikibot method does not support that for some reason. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:02, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@JJMC89, thanks, pip install sseclient==0.0.22 worked. — Qwerfjkltalk 10:55, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

The EventStream gives changes like:

{'$schema': '/mediawiki/recentchange/1.0.0', 'meta': {'uri': 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_in-text_citations_from_May_2015', 'request_id': '4cabf16c-7cd5-4128-8622-423642642eb5', 'id': '0966337a-cf78-4219-bdca-f27a8555301a', 'dt': '2023-02-17T11:00:51Z', 'domain': 'en.wikipedia.org', 'stream': 'mediawiki recentchange', 'topic': 'eqiad.mediawiki.recentchange', 'partition': 0, 'offset': 4541357697}, 'id': 1602746521, 'type': 'categorize', 'namespace': 14, 'title': 'Category:Articles lacking in-text citations from May 2015', 'comment': '[[:Mike Moore (American politician)]] removed from category, [[Special:WhatLinksHere/Mike Moore (American politician)|this page is included within other pages]]', 'timestamp': 1676631651, 'user': 'Indy beetle', 'bot': False, 'server_url': 'https://en.wikipedia.org', 'server_name': 'en.wikipedia.org', 'server_script_path': '/w', 'wiki': 'enwiki', 'parsedcomment': '<a href="/wiki/Mike_Moore_(American_politician)" title="Mike Moore (American politician)">Mike Moore (American politician)</a> removed from category, <a href="/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Mike_Moore_(American_politician)" title="Special:WhatLinksHere/Mike Moore (American politician)">this page is included within other pages</a>'}

How would I get the diff from this? I can't tell what the ID is (it's not revid), so the only way I can see is matching it up by checking through the page's history. — Qwerfjkltalk 11:03, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't think you can, directly. id is rc_id from the recentchanges table. The recentchanges API gives it as rcid, but also has the more useful revid.

            {
                "type": "categorize",
                "ns": 14,
                "title": "Category:Articles lacking in-text citations from May 2015",
                "pageid": 3397480,
                "revid": 1139888565,
                "old_revid": 1139888501,
                "rcid": 1602746521,
                "user": "Indy beetle",
                "bot": false,
                "new": false,
                "minor": false,
                "oldlen": 0,
                "newlen": 0
            }

— JJMC89 (T·C) 00:07, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

@JJMC89, what would be the best way of getting the diff then? Can I query for revid from rcid, or would I need to match up the page history with the timestamp? — Qwerfjkltalk 09:54, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

VisualEditor "double click to edit cell" stopped working

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T329983

Hello! I was made aware of this page over on Wikipedia:Help_desk. I'll copy and paste what I wrote there:

"Hello! Earlier today, double clicking to edit a cell in VisualEditor was working fine. Out of the blue, it's stopped working. I've checked on multiple pages (including my own sandbox), and it's not working on any of them. ...I don't know why the double click has suddenly stopped, or what I can do to get it working again. Any help is appreciated, please! Thank you so much, have a great day!"

The browser I'm using is Firefox, version 109.0.1. HeyElliott (talk) 22:54, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

@HeyElliott I'm not 100% familiar with all the VE actions, but when I quickly checked it looks like perhaps this was improved? When I went to a table with VE, single clicking "selected" the cell and highlighted it, then typing allowed it to be changed. (Double click was not necessary). — xaosflux ^Talk 18:22, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

If I single click and start typing then the cell is blanked and I can type new content but not edit the old. If I single click and press enter then I can edit the old content but that is hard to guess. If I hover over a cell then MediaWiki:Visualeditor-tablecell-tooltip is displayed. It says "Double click to edit cell" so something is wrong unless we later get a delayed update to the message. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:25, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Yea, PrimeHunter is correct, it's still not working. Double click used to work, and single clicking the cell then editing it still doesn't allow you to click on the links in the cell (and sometimes, it won't even let me edit the normal text). HeyElliott (talk) 22:28, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

This should be resolved now. It was caused by an attempt to improve text selection behavior in Firefox around "focusable nodes" (e.g. references, templates) that backfired. Sorry about that. Matma Rex talk 22:03, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Awesome, it is working again, thank you so much! And no problem at all, I understand that stuff happens when trying to improve and update stuff. Thanks again, hope you have a good day! HeyElliott (talk) 22:58, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Getting rid of this menu when I hover over Contributions

Resolved

 – Directions provided. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:14, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

File:Error Message 17-02-2023.png

What I see

How do I get rid of this menu when I hover over Contributions? Interstellarity (talk) 16:03, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Preferences → Beta features → Content Translation. Nardog (talk) 16:14, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. Interstellarity (talk) 19:30, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

List of articles within redirect

Can someone create a list of pages that are technically redirects, but have have lots of extended content under it? I just noticed at Special:Diff/1139937056 that someone wrote an entire article about some non-notable film director under the redirect Film Maker and it went unnoticed for 14 whole months! So, there must be more such pages. It may also help detect some old cut & paste moves because you can create a redirect by only editing the lead (section 0), while leaving rest of the sections intact, which often happens if mobile interface edit button is used which opens edit page on a section-by-section basis. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 16:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@CX Zoom perhaps something like this will work for you? quarry:query/71445. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:18, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@CX Zoom may be better to limit to only pages in mainspace? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:19, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, please limit it to mainspace for the time being. When all is done, will move to other namespaces. Also, reduce the size limit to 1000. I don't think any redirect should be more than that ideally. The current limit of 10,000 will leave out many pages, for example, the above one was only about 3,300 bytes in size. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 18:28, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/Redirects obscuring page content used to provide this information, I think. It might be worth reviving. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:30, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@CX Zoom Try starting with this batch — xaosflux ^Talk 19:59, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I've created a wikitable on User:DVRTed/sandbox/large redirects based on that query's response with added wikilinks (w/ redirect=no). — DVRTed (Talk) 20:12, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you to everyone involved in this. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 11:37, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

New tag?

I noticed the tag "campaign-external-machine-translation" appear on this edit. I checked Special:Tags and it's on there but it has no description so I have absolutely no clue what this tag is supposed to mean. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 17:39, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf it's an old tag (see phab:T216123) however, I don't expect it to be showing up here (unless someone is very manually injecting it themselves). So there may be a bug that is tagging things with this that shouldn't be. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:04, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

INteresting. WOuld you mind filing a phab about it then? I would do so myself however phab is broken on this device and shows up as if it were just the bare HTML without any of the CSS. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 18:11, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

recent changes for ref. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:13, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

VE Citation Tool Issues

I used https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.1.217 to autogenerate ref and the output is incorrect. Ditto for https://read.dukeupress.edu/journal-of-asian-studies/article-abstract/74/1/23/326718. TrangaBellam (talk) 19:31, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@TrangaBellam: on the first one, it looks like the source is odd there in that it is a lookup of the actual source instead of the source itself? Are you trying to reference academic.oup.com or just the journal? Try putting in just the DOI. Else, when you say it is wrong, please provide us some details. As in: The output was X, I expected it to be Y. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:11, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

The first one, if you put in just the DOI number, produces this:

Khan, Yasmin (2016-02). "Venkat Dhulipala. Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India ". The American Historical Review. 121 (1): 217–218. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.1.217. ISSN 0002-8762. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

If you put in the URL, it produces this:

academic.oup.com. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.1.217 https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/ahr/121.1.217. Retrieved 2023-02-22. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

The first is obviously better than the second. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:01, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Copy formulas in .png

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T324451

Hi ! Please help. Now all formulas present in .svg format. I try to copy articles with formulas to LibreOffice, Word, Google Docs. It doesnt't work, only text is copied. Thank You !) Veritas-Universum (talk) 07:40, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

@Veritas-Universum: phab:T324451 has a very little on this, the current short answer from the devs seems to be "take a screenshot of it"... — xaosflux ^Talk 12:04, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

It's very bad solution, if you have hundreds of formulas and you need text. Please tell me, would be add this option in to settings by developers ? Maybe optionally. Veritas-Universum (talk) 14:12, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

@Veritas-Universum if you want the "text" of hundreds of formulas from an article, you can get the wikitext, then use some sort of wiki-text to LaTeX converter. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:24, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Template:EIN produces a link that results in 404 not found

Formerly the link produced led to an IRS page with useful information. Now the result seems to always be a 404. See Wikimedia Foundation infobox which contains EIN 200049703 for an example. Not sure this is the right place for this. I tried the template talk page and left a question on the creators talk page and got no response. Gab4gab (talk) 15:30, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Responded at Template talk:EIN. I don't see a way to fix this one. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:27, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Excel to Wikipedia tables

Is there any quick way to turn Excel tables into Wikipedia tables? Looking through the archives I only see discussions about the opposite direction (Wikipedia tables to Excel) but maybe I missed something. I also have a vague awareness that some users have their own scripts or something to accomplish this. Thank you. Volunteer Marek 16:47, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

There are online converters that will do it for you. Nthep (talk) 17:19, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

In addition to what can be found online (apparently LibreOffice has an extension that can help), commons:Commons:Convert tables and charts to wiki code or image files lists some options, including two Toolforge-hosted tools. As far as I can tell from the documentation, though, those two tools work on tab-separated text, so if you're looking to preserve any of the original formatting, you'll need something else. isaacl (talk) 17:45, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

@Volunteer Marek: I have occasionally done this, using Excel itself. Assume that you have an Excel sheet like this:

	A	B
1	Player	Goals
2	Brown	15
3	Jones	6
4	Smith	11

you can set up one more column containing formulas to generate the Wikimarkup for rows:

	A	B	C
1	Player	Goals	="|-| "&A1&" || "&B1
2	Brown	15	="|-| "&A2&" || "&B2
3	Jones	6	="|-| "&A3&" || "&B3
4	Smith	11	="|-| "&A4&" || "&B4

Then you would go to your Wikipedia page and set up the start of the table:

{| class=wikitable
|+ List of players

|}

Now return to your Excel sheet, select the top cell of the new column (C1 in my example) and extend your selection down to the bottom cell of the same column (C4 in my example). Copy this selection to your clipboard. In your Wikipedia page, click in that gap in the table, and paste from the clipboard. You should now have this:

{| class=wikitable
|+ List of players
|-! Player || Goals
|-| Brown || 15
|-| Jones || 6
|-| Smith || 11
|}

It's not finished yet. Add a newline after each instance of |- to get

{| class=wikitable
|+ List of players
|-
! Player || Goals
|-
| Brown || 15
|-
| Jones || 6
|-
| Smith || 11
|}

Preview it, and you should see this

List of players

Player	Goals
Brown	15
Jones	6
Smith	11

If that looks right, save it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:34, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

You can copy-paste a table directly from Excel to VisualEditor but it may have issues in practice. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:44, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you all for the answers. Volunteer Marek 21:53, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Just emphasizing that Primehunter's advice is on target. I've made many tables, and I (now) always copy-paste in VE. I think some editors were turned off by early problems in VE and never use it, but it's handling of tables makes it very worthwhile, even if you use the source editor most of the time S Philbrick(Talk) 16:14, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Volunteer Marek, the visual editor also accepts .csv files by drag and drop. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:02, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

@Volunteer Marek Try toolforge:excel2wiki. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 04:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Template:Infobox boxing match

Following the result of an RfC (see Template talk:Infobox boxing match#RfC about fighter age), I've added Age to Template:Infobox boxing match, and updated the documentation. However, I am hoping to change the code of the template to automatically add age to the infobox. I hope to use the source code at User:Tbf69/sandbox/datetest, for this, however I need to use code that will be retrieve the fighters name, date-of-birth and the fight date. I'm not sure how to do this though. --- Tbf69 P • T 17:35, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

I followed you from your talk page, and I kind of asked the question in a roundabout way, but... what do you mean by "automatically add age to the infobox"? Unless you are going to have a massive list/table/module of every match and every fighters age during that match, the parameters will likely need to be added to each article individually. Primefac (talk) 17:48, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I thought that may be the case. --- Tbf69 P • T 18:23, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Scroll over text on links are teeny, tiny and unreadable

New today, even in just the last couple of hours. Modern Skin on Wikipedia, MonoBook on Commons. I did not make any changes on my end that caused this. This affects Wikipedia in various languages, and affects Commons. Does not affect Wikisource, which I have set at MonoBook. When I scroll over linked words, the text is so teeny and visually faint I need a magnifying glass to read it. This also includes the sidebar sections such as Navigation, Search, Contribute, Tools, etc. etc. Not browser specific, as I can see this on Edge, Chrome and Firefox. What gives on this? — Maile (talk) 22:21, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

@Maile66 they look fine to me? First try this, open this link in a "private/incognito/etc" window and verify if everything is fine or not? (Ruling out your own personal scripts, gadgets, etc compared to the default ones). — xaosflux ^Talk 22:44, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

What is "a "private/incognito/etc" window"? — Maile (talk) 22:48, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

FYI, I just noticed something odd about the above "Excel to Wikipedia tables" on my browsers. It looks normal on Firefox. On Chrome and Edge, the tables look OK, but the text contained within the "</syntaxhighlight> parts: fonts looks all faded and different . — Maile (talk) 22:59, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

In Firefox, in the hamburger at top right, select "New private window", then try to reproduce the problem using ?useskin=modern at the end of the URL. Izno (talk) 23:12, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

See Private Browsing - Use Firefox without saving history at Mozilla Support. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:05, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

In firefox, right click the link and pick "Open link in new private window" - it will load a fresh browser, you won't be logged in on that window and most of your browser extensions won't be running - that is a quick way to see what a page looks like for readers too. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:22, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I found that to get a private window. RL has my attention at the moment, and I haven't had a chance to look into it yet. — Maile (talk) 00:37, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, I guess we can close this out. I didn't get around to the private window test, when I realized the above-mentioned issue is not on everything. i.e, scrolling over inline sourcing comes up normal size and as clear as could be. And I have otherwise also noticed the teeny type on non-Wikipedia links - my bookmarks, for instance. Thanks for your time, folks. — Maile (talk) 02:26, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

How to install/activate "Related articles"?

While updating WP:DE-ORPHAN section Finding related articles, I found this suggestion:

Highly related articles are typically linked in the uppermost lead of an article, in its "See also" section (if existent) and the automatically suggested "RELATED ARTICLES" below the article.

I have not seen any articles showing this, and am looking for instructions to install the "Related articles"? I did Search here, then looked through Preferences, Gadgets, etc. and have not found anything. JoeNMLC (talk) 23:24, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

This is a feature supported by certain skins. It is supported in Minerva skin (and hence mobile) and in Timeless skin, see the bottom of Minerva and Timeless. It would need consensus to activate in other skins, though I suspect a gadget could potentially get the relevant info and display it? Izno (talk) 23:35, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

@Izno, I think

mw.loader.load(['ext.relatedArticles.readMore.bootstrap', 'ext.relatedArticles.styles']);

works. — Qwerfjkltalk 07:06, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

If you want to see similar results one-off, you can use the morelike: search control. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:25, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

 Done - Thanks for the answer. At first I used Vector-legacy, then last year switched to Monobook. Now I switched to Timeless, and after some "tweaking" I'm now good-to-go. I will clarify the Related-articles for those two skins only. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 02:46, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

It works in Vector 2010 as well; volunteer-me begged that Product team to enable it for w:ht: years ago. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Tonight, I tested above js for load related-articles with skin Monobook and it does not work. I added into my common.js, last line. No worries as I'm Ok with Timeless skin. JoeNMLC (talk) 02:45, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Navigation box in Minerva skin

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T111565

Hi guys, I wanted to know why navigation boxes as {{Constructed languages}} never appear if I'm browsing using the Minerva skin, pretty much any mobile device?

Is there a code I could add to my custom CSS pages to force it appear to me on Minerva skin? --Esperfulmo (talk) 20:48, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

No collapsible elements work on the minerva skin since it isn't enabled and will only show tables/divs in their fully expanded state. The phab task to enable it has been going nowhere fast since 2015 so it probably won't change anytime soon. I am not too sure if there are any userscripts to help with this or not though. Terasail^[✉️] 21:12, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

The specific relevant task is actually phab:T124168.

Esperfulmo: You can see navboxes above a certain resolution on desktop Minerva (en.wikipedia.org). You could make them display below a certain resolution with some CSS. You cannot see them on mobile (en.m.wikipedia.org) and there is nothing you can do to work around that. Izno (talk) 22:07, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Terasail and Izno for the info. I'll see what I'll have to do. I also wondered why collapsible templates were always shown, like the {{weather box}}. --Esperfulmo (talk) 01:05, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

They weren't. Izno (talk) 02:16, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Gadget-NewImageThumb appears to shrink thumbnails when typing in reply tool

Try it out. Enable the gadget and type in the reply tool (not the edit summary box, that won't work), you'd notice the image thumbnail would shrink. Aaron Liu (talk) 23:42, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

It's caused by the gadget code here: MediaWiki:Gadget-NewImageThumb.js#L-18 this will make each thumbnail 2px narrower every time the preview is refreshed. Matma Rex talk 03:22, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Why would they do that??? Aaron Liu (talk) 03:36, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I… don't know? We'd have to ask the gadget author. It clearly takes the width, subtracts two, and sets the width back, and it does it from the wikipage.content hook, which runs on every preview. Matma Rex talk 04:02, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

From the top of my head… 2px is the border from thumbinner. A border which the style of the gadget doesn’t have/want, yet the dimensions in the form of width style statements in the HTML do include. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:57, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I think this could be fixed by just making the gadget only process each thumbnail once, by making use of the parameter to the hook:

mw.hook( 'wikipage.content' ).add( function( $content ) {
    $content.find( '.thumbinner' ).not( '.mp-thumb' ).each( function() {
        $( this ).css( 'width', ( parseInt( $( this ).css( 'width' ) ) - 2 ) + 'px' );
    } );
} );

Matma Rex talk 01:44, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-08

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

Problems

• Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future. [2]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).
• The voting phase for the Community Wishlist Survey 2023 ends on 24 February at 18:00 UTC. The results of the survey will be announced on 28 February.

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [3][4][5]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:55, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Automated citation "fixing" bots are inserting pharmaceutical/other spam into articles

While doing one of my periodic trawls for vandalism I noticed a surprisingly large number of edits that were unquestionably net-negative to wikipedia, but were not the result of blatant vandalism: refs in articles being turned into "buy cheap Viagra essay online" spam advertising, making public-facing articles rather embarrassing.

One scenario: A website, probably a retailer but not an overtly scammy one, stuffs their title tags with a bunch of SEO keywords. The bot grabs the title tag and SEO keywords, despite the actual title intended for humans appearing later in the article.

Another, more common scenario: A website dies and is purchased by some spammy company. The Wayback Machine's archive only goes as far back as the spam does. Wikipedia has a reference to this website in an article, perhaps a "serious" one like Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, or a very well-known one, like KRS-One. Some well-meaning users run a well-meaning bot or automated tool -- User:Citation bot, Wikipedia:Reflinks, others -- that goes to Wayback and unceremoniously replaces something bland but unembarrassing like "Archived copy" with embarrassing spam.

I can see the argument that this is putting a band-aid on a larger underlying problem, which is that we are auto-linking to the Internet Archive and semi-permanently inserting spam into references sections, and making that harder to detect by not giving it an appropriate name. But the odds someone is going to actually click such a link seem lower to me than the odds that someone is going to see the spam text. It's also not immediately obvious how to fix it, since obviously legitimate references do exist on Viagra and essay mills and online pharmacies and everything else like this I haven't found yet, meaning a fully automated blacklist is out. (This also makes it hard to find these.) But either way, it is a really bad look for the encyclopedia, and in high-profile articles. Gnomingstuff (talk) 08:07, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

It's the internet. it happens. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:35, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I assume the bot retrieves the earliest good archive dated after the access-date, which usually resembles what the citing editor saw but is occasionally spam. Could the bot also retrieve the latest good archive dated before the access-date, and compare titles, listing those which differ or have no prior archive? Would that list be short enough for humans to trawl through, given the ease of distinguishing quickly by eye between

1. Before: Smith scores goal; After: Goal scored by Smith
2. Before: Smith scores goal; After: Buy stuff from SpamCo today!!!

This might not handle the rare first scenario, but should deal with the second common case above easily, at least when a prior archive exists. Certes (talk) 13:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there often isn't a prior archive, which I assume is when this happens. The template also complains if you leave the title field blank. But that would be better, since adding "buy cialis now free online pharmacy cheap meds!" into article space is worse than adding nothing; in any other context this would be considered unambiguous vandalism. Gnomingstuff (talk) 14:58, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Preview fail on today’s featured article

The page preview is broken on today’s featured article: if you hover your mouse over the link to New Jersey's 1927 biannual elections proposal, you get the screenshot on the right. Note that the Tools/Navigation popups are unaffected (the preview as a logged-in user seems reasonable), so you might want to open a private window to test.

Does anyone know how to solve that (1) fast, and (2) without doing a gazillion tests on a main page item? Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 09:22, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Tested on Firefox 110.0 on Windows 10 if it matters (I assume it does not). Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 09:25, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Likely due to this vandalism, which has been fixed. CMD (talk) 09:28, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, it is now fixed on my side. (Today I learned that main page items are not semi-protected.) Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 09:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Tigraan: See WP:PEREN#Protect Today's Featured Article on the Main Page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:42, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

THere was a bot that had a trial run in protecting main page items. I don't know what happened to it though. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 17:17, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Lint Error link from Page information missing

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T301374

Resolved

 – This section now appears dynamically, only when lint errors are present. — xaosflux ^Talk 10:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

What happened to the Lint errors link at the bottom of every "Page information" page, which has now been replaced by Wiki checker? The latter serves no purpose there. WikiChecker provides some basic stats, but similar and more in-depth stats can be found on the Revision history statistics. Why was it replaced? Qwerty284651 (talk) 14:06, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Qwerty284651: it looks like phab:T301374 was completed, and if there are lint errors on a page, they will show there (e.g. currently on this page you can see one). If there are none, it doesn't appear. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:32, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, it was removed for that reason.[6] A "Lint errors" section will not appear in the TOC on page information. The TOC is not automatic but added by MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header which has hard-coded the normal sections. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:37, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

It's still there for any page with Linter errors (this one shows 61 errors currently; the page has at least 82 errors, but that is a different story). – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:41, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

The post is about a link which was always under "External tools" until three days ago. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:49, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter, will the "Lint error" under "External tool" be reinstated or is this a permanent removal and replacement with "WikiChecker"? Qwerty284651 (talk) 14:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Qwerty284651 I think you're missing something here, it was removed because it was redundant. If a page actually has any lint errors, a dedicated section for lint errors appears now, directly above where it says "External tools". So there is no need for this to also be there. The wikichecker thing has nothing to do with delisting this item. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:07, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) WikiChecker has actually been there since 2015.[7] The whole "External tools" section is made locally by the English Wikipedia with MediaWiki:Pageinfo-footer. You could suggest "Lint errors" is reinstated on the talk page but I don't see a good reason when pages with lint erors have a whole "Lint errors" section which includes the link. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:10, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

It makes it easy to locate and fix lint errors if any are present on a page, instead of having to go on Special:LintErrors and manually type out the link. Qwerty284651 (talk) 15:46, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Qwerty284651 I don't think you are understanding what we said above. Go to any page that actually has a lint error, click on page information, go to the bottom of the page and look. Let us know if that isn't working please. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:48, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Also, User:PerfektesChaos/js/lintHint may be even easier than going to a separate page. It will highlight the section containing each error when you click on the little down-arrow next to the error description. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:15, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Jonesey95, I've had that tool installed in .js subpage for a while now, but it stopped highlighting the lint errors in red, except for <center>. I thought it was in conflict with the tools/gadgets I had installed in the .js page, tried to fix it but couldn't so I gave up on it. Qwerty284651 (talk) 18:49, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Xaosflux, I added intentional link errors to my subpage. The "Page information" displays them as expected. Qwerty284651 (talk) 18:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

not-in-the-other-language.toolforge.org

I really love this tool and am grateful to whoever made it. But I was wondering if there was any way to compare one-to-multiple. Like, getting a list of articles the German and French Wikipedias have, but the English Wikipedia does not? Because I'd like to continue and expand Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/de. BorgQueen (talk) 18:36, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Timeless skin - Missing - Watch/Unwatch link

Greetings, I recently switched to Timeless skin. Today, at an article I wanted to add to my Watchlist, I cannot find that Link anywhere. The Alt-shift-w keypress function works okay to both add and remove from Watchlist. I did read about Timeless at Mediawiki here. No mention of Watchlist, so I'm asking for help here. Is there anything I can patch into Timeless-Custom CSS? Or should this be handled as a software fix?

First I did start with Vector legacy, then last year switched to MonoBook. Both Vector-L and Monobook have the "Watch" or "Unwatch" links. Cheers, JoeNMLC (talk) 19:27, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@JoeNMLC in timeless watch/unwatch is a star icon under the title, right of "talk". — xaosflux ^Talk 19:33, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: - Thanks, I missed that Star-icon. When I hover, it does not say "Watch" or "Unwatch". It displays the page-hover instead. JoeNMLC (talk) 19:40, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

 Done - I see Solid-Star = Watched / Open-star = Un-Watched. JoeNMLC (talk) 19:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@JoeNMLC: By default it says "Add this page to your watchlist" on hover, or a variation of Mediawiki:Tooltip-ca-watch if you have set another language. It sounds like you have enabled "Navigation popups" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. This overrides the default hover text on the watchlist star in Timeless but not in Vector or Vector-2022. It could be reported at one of the options at Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups#Feedback. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:56, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

User TP section-level editing

Hi, people. I was unable to solve this whole day long. On my User TP there is no section-level editing button-link "Edit" (nor "Edit source", for that matter, although I guess only source editing works in TP anyway?). I looked in Pref's, I checked for Magic words in source - to no avail. I have several nav templates included there but I tried to remove them with purging the page and that didn't help either. How to force those "Edit" (and/or "Edit source") to appear next to my TP section titles? ౪ Santa ౪^99° 22:38, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

In the section "Edits to Archived Discussion at WP:RSN", the template {{talk archive navigation}} is transcluded. IIRC, that template disables the section edit links. --rchard2scout (talk) 22:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that would do it. Izno (talk) 23:20, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Rchard2scout, thank you for the tip, fortunately @PrimeHunter resolved it before I could read this post, so thank you to both of you on expeditious reaction and help - thanks guys ! ౪ Santa ౪^99° 23:20, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Chrome in-browser translation produces sub/superscript errors

The heading has been changed since the problem is more general than what was initially noticed. The first three entries below are before the heading was changed. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 03:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Chrome browser is having some odd trouble with just one page for me: acetone peroxide. This page produces a glitch that adds spaces around subscripts (actual spaces as text) and dislocates the brackets for the citation needed template (in image). It does not appear when in either the edit preview or the visual editor, and edge & IE browsers are not affected. I couldn't see anything obviously wrong in the source, but I'm not good at finding errors. I feel like Chrome is just getting better and better at breaking long-standing functionality. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 06:37, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

First guess. One of ur browser extensions is interfering. Try disabling them temporarily. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:56, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I tried that to no avail, but I tried opening in incognito mode and that fixes it. I just noticed that Chrome is thinking that page is written in German and trying to translate it, so maybe there is some kind of language tag on the page? If it's just autodetecting the language wrong then I'm doubtful that much can be done though. EDIT: All WP pages translated in Chrome are getting messed up like that, from any language it seems. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 19:34, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

This bug is affecting all pages I have translated with a chrome browser into english. I have found this happens on at least one other computer but if anybody can reproduce this or not it would be appreciated. Curiously, I simply haven't been able to find a "citation needed" on any non-english page so it's not clear if those are always broken. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 03:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Why am I seeing both "show" and "inspect diff"?

Clicking on Inspect diff (which doesn't always do anything for some reason which is a pain) and then clicking on Hide diff results in my now seeing "show" instead of "inspect". Doug Weller talk 09:09, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

This sounds like User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/contribsHistory.js by User:Writ Keeper —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:44, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Once a diff has been loaded onto your browser tab's allocated memory, the script doesn't have to fetch it from the server and can show it synchronously, hence "show" instead of "inspect". Nardog (talk) 11:09, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

@Nardog thanks, that makes sense! Doug Weller talk 12:05, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Vector 22 problem with co-ordinates

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T281974

With the new vector, there is a physical overlap in some articles between an FA star and the co-ordinates. This can be seen on, for example, SS Politician, where the star lies partially on top of the co-ordinates. This is also be a problem with GAs, as can be seen on Oxford Street. Switching the screen width between the default unfathomably narrow and a normal setting doesn't get rid of the problem, so some technical change will be needed. - SchroCat (talk) 18:16, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

please discuss on the coordinates template page and its associated Module. There was no agreement on the way forward, so there is a stalemate regarding this english wikipedia problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

It's a technical issue, the roots of which I do not know, so I will leave it here. Whether it's a problem from the co-ordinate side or the FA/GA icon side, I know not, but what I do know is that it's a problem that has only started with the new skin, and as there should be some WMF people monitoring this to pick up the multitude of problems with the skin, they can pick up on it and sort it out. - SchroCat (talk) 20:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

It is a hot mess, but these are placed locally not directly in the skin - so it's something for us to worry about. Part of the arguments are that the skin designers want to split up parts of the page in vector-2022 to include "meta" things (information about the page) and "content" things (information about the subject). One of the primary arguments is that the skin developers think that "coordinates" are "meta", while some editors think that they are "content". Most people agree that things like "Feature Article" icons are about "the page" (i.e. "This is a good page about this thing") not the content (i.e. "This is a good subject") - so they got a home - but coordinates are in limbo. Coordinates are mostly in the same place on all skins, even vector-2022 - but the FA icons got pushed down to make way for that sister-projects bar. Since they really want that sister projects bar up there, the community here will need to decide what we want to do with everything else, or get the skin people to make accommodations. See phab:T281974 for some of the backlog of this. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:22, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Coordinates are content. When there's only one set on the page, they're placed upper right for ease of finding. Pages with two or more sets of coords usually have them at appropriate places in the body, and there is no coord at top right. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:41, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, and Xaosflux is saying that the argument concerns that fa icons are meta and therefore they should NOT be sharing the same space as coordinates, whereas others are saying that it doesn’t really matter, but if it’s content, then WE need to find an appropriate spot, as the previous spot is now accepted by meta information. Regardless. A spot needs to be picked. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:52, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Yup, and we know how easy it is to get people to agree on things here! — xaosflux ^Talk 23:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Editing news 2023 #1

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

This newsletter includes two key updates about the Editing team's work:

1. The Editing team will finish adding new features to the Talk pages project and deploy it.
2. They are beginning a new project, Edit check.

Talk pages project

Some of the upcoming changes

The Editing team is nearly finished with this first phase of the Talk pages project. Nearly all new features are available now in the Beta Feature for Discussion tools.

It will show information about how active a discussion is, such as the date of the most recent comment. There will soon be a new "Add topic" button. You will be able to turn them off at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion. Please tell them what you think.

Daily edit completion rate by test group: DiscussionTools (test group) and MobileFrontend overlay (control group)

An A/B test for Discussion tools on the mobile site has finished. Editors were more successful with Discussion tools. The Editing team is enabling these features for all editors on the mobile site.

New Project: Edit Check

The Editing team is beginning a project to help new editors of Wikipedia. It will help people identify some problems before they click "Publish changes". The first tool will encourage people to add references when they add new content. Please watch that page for more information. You can join a conference call on 3 March 2023 to learn more.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Mobile DiscussionTools Deployment

Hi y'all – the Editing Team would value knowing what – if anything – concerns you about the current plan to offer the suite of mobile DiscussionTools to everyone (logged in and out) by default at en.wiki during the week beginning on 6 March 2023.

What mobile talk pages look like when DiscussionTools are enabled.

Please join us on WT:TALKPP where @Xaosflux, @Blaze Wolf, and I have started talking about this.

---

For context, the plan to offer the suite of mobile DiscussionTools to everyone is a response to:

• Learning through an A/B test, that mobile DiscussionTools cause: people to publish more edits, people to be more likely to publish the edits they start, and more unique people to publish ≥ 1 talk page edit (see the full report) and
• The suite of mobile DiscussionTools becoming available to everyone (logged in and out) by default at all Wikimedia wikis last week, on 15 Feb.

PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:43, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Problem with nationality in infobox officeholder

Hello, I added some information to the "nationality" paramter in infobox officeholder of Seiichirō Yasui, but after saving, it doesn't show. Weirdly enough, the "nationality" parameter works if I switch it to infobox person. Any idea on why this is? Taiwanesetoast888 (talk) 00:51, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@Taiwanesetoast888: It's an undocumented feature of {{Infobox officeholder}}. nationality = Japanese is not displayed when birth_place contains "Japan". It's similar for other countries. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:16, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Interesting... so if I delete 'Japan' from birth_place, would nationality work then? Taiwanesetoast888 (talk) 03:51, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, but I don't see reason to do that. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:33, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Using the nationality parameter for politicians is redundant anyways, as it is usually self-evident; in this case, the Governor of Tokyo is obviously someone of Japanese nationality. Curbon7 (talk) 04:16, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

WP:INFONAT says "Most biography infoboxes have nationality and citizenship. Generally, use of either should be avoided when the country to which the subject belongs can be inferred from the country of birth, as specified with |birthplace=". DuncanHill (talk) 12:30, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Help!

I delete quite a lot of pages each day and use Twinkle to do so. But suddenly, the notifications Twinkle is posting are malformed. See the bottom message at User talk:Kunalkelekar1 for an example. I've left a message at WT:TWINKLE but maybe it's an issue with a template that Twinkle uses. But there isn't a noticeboard to ask about problems with templates. So, I just thought I'd post here in case some one could figure out what the problem is. I'm sure that I won't be the only person affected by this. Thanks, in advance, for any help you can offer. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:41, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I just noticed that things are not screwed up for the G13 notice that I use the most (thank goodness). But the messages I posted that were malformed were for G11s. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:45, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Appears to be a stray noinclude tag left over after some recent edits in {{Db-deleted-multiple}} (So regular G11 messages should actually still be fine right now as long as it's just G11). I've left a note over at Template talk:Db-notice. Aidan9382 _(talk) 08:11, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

 Fixed. The edit request at Template talk:Db-notice#Template-protected edit request on 23 February 2023 was accepted. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:54, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Guidance on more complex Template functionality?

Hi there! I hope this is the right place to put this - it felt like a better fit than Wikipedia:Requested templates, since I already had some of the work written out.

I'm trying to create a template that takes start years and end years and displays them as a range for a running table - for example, 2020-22 - while truncating the second date unless it rolls into a second century (1997-2002). I'm having trouble getting the formatting right to have it check whether the truncation is necessary.

Additionally, I want to be able to list multiple ranges on the same entry (1997-2002, 2020-22) with a check if a secondary set of years is used (under different parameters, start/start2, end/end2, etc.), but I'm struggling to parse that all out.

Would somebody more versed in template syntax be willing to lend a hand with all of this? Thanks in advance! fuzzy510 (talk) 21:36, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@Fuzzy510 This is the sort of thing that technically be done with template syntax, but the resulting code will be a mess to read, or it can be done much more neatly in Lua. I'll see if I can work something up. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:02, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I haven't looked into exactly what you are trying to do but there is {{Str rightc}} if you just want to get the last 2 numbers of a paramter, you can use that template. Terasail^[✉️] 22:02, 23 February 2023 (UTC)