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Citations with title parameter in rtl language, beginning with numbers: Display issue and workaround

Citations with a title parameter in a right-to-left language such as Hebrew, that begin (on the right) with a number (which itself is left-to-right) have trouble displaying the foreign and English-translated titles correctly. In this example, the Hebrew number 12 is intentionally translated as 13 to make the errors clearer. In the markup, the Hebrew title begins (on the right) with the number 12, but it incorrectly displays in the editing screen, and here shown literally with <nowiki>, with the number on the left. (This problem is not confined to citations, but exists throughout Wikipedia, and is beyond the scope of this issue.) {{cite web}} is used here, but the same problem appears with other cite templates including {{cite news}}.

The two citation bugs are:

• Without the English title protected by <span dir="ltr">, the English number moves into the Hebrew title.
• Without the Hebrew title protected by <span lang="he" dir="rtl">, the Hebrew title displays with the number on the left instead of the right.

Markup text	Displays as
{{cite web |author=Tova Green |date=6 May 2010 |title=12 ימים|language=he |trans_title=13 days |publisher=Maybe So |url=http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html |accessdate=15 May 2010}}	Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
{{cite web |author=Tova Green |date=6 May 2010 |title=<span lang="he" dir="rtl">12 ימים</span> |language=he |trans_title=13 days |publisher=Maybe So |url=http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html |accessdate=15 May 2010}}	Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
{{cite web |author=Tova Green |date=6 May 2010 |title=12 ימים |language=he |trans_title=<span dir="ltr">13 days</span> |publisher=Maybe So |url=http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html |accessdate=15 May 2010}}	Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
{{cite web |author=Tova Green |date=6 May 2010 |title=<span lang="he" dir="rtl">12 ימים</span> |language=he |trans_title=<span dir=ltr>13 days</span> |publisher=Maybe So |url=http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html |accessdate=15 May 2010}}	Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)

—Anomalocaris (talk) 01:42, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Is the fourth example the one that is displayed correctly? It looks like adding a span dir="ltr" declaration automatically for |title= parameters when ltr languages are declared in |language= might do the trick. I have paged the folks who know the details of the Lua code that underlies most of the cite/citation templates. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:38, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Jonesey95: Yes, the fourth example is the one that is displayed correctly. As I say, the workaround involves mucking with both the |title= and the |trans_title= parameter. Whatever the difficulties in handling rtl languages in the title parameter (or anywhere else), the |trans_title= parameter shouldn't need additional script for ordinary English to display correctly. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:41, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not thinking that this is a CS1 problem. I think I can duplicate the problem outside of a CS1 template by simply copying the Hebrew characters from one of these citations and pasting them into this edit window:

ימים

If I then put the cursor at the right end of the Hebrew string and type any letter on my keyboard ('a' in this case)

ימיםa

then the character is placed to the right of the Hebrew string. This is how it should work, correct? If I repeat the above experiment but instead type a number ('9'), the number is placed at the left of the Hebrew string:

ימים9

From this I think that I can conclude that the problem lies elsewhere than in CS1.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:01, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Trappist the monk: You are right that the behavior in my second bullet point is not confined to |title= parameters of {{cite}} templates. It's a problem throughout Wikipedia, and it's actually the behavior you would expect. If you have Hebrew embedded in an English stream, and the Hebrew begins with a number, the displaying software has no way of knowing that the number is part of the Hebrew (and therefore has to be on the right of it) unless some additional markup brackets the number together with the Hebrew. So my second bullet is not really a bug. One could argue with the |language= parameter set to a rtl language the |title= parameter should be assumed to be rtl. Unfortunately Wikipedians do not strictly follow this rule. There are many instances where the |title= parameter is the English-translated title even when the |language= parameter is set to an rtl language such as Hebrew. So I would advise against any special treatment for the |title= parameter to fix the second bullet "bug". But the first bullet really is a bug. Plain English shouldn't need additional markup to display correctly.—Anomalocaris (talk) 06:41, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Module:Citation/CS1 simply concatenates |title=, |trans-title=, and appropriate punctuation into an internal variable Title. This variable is used either as-is, or as the display text for |url= when the code renders the citation:

[http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html "12 ימים" [13 days]]

If an editor wraps the content of |title= in <bdi>...</bdi>, the concatenated result is correct.

[http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html "<bdi lang="he" dir="rtl">12 ימים</bdi>" [13 days]]

It occurs to me that the module could automatically wrap every |title= with <bdi>...</bdi> tags regardless of language. This problem isn't limited to digit-initial |trans-title=. This:

{{cite book |title=ימים |volume=2}}

produces this:

ימים. Vol. 2.

with <bdi>...</bdi> we get

ימים. Vol. 2.

I'll experiment with having the module wrap |title= values after I make a currently pending update to the live module code. I will post my results at Help talk:Citation Style 1.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:04, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I think <bdi> should fix it; see Help:HTML in wikitext#bdi. Have to check browser support though.

Markup	Renders as
{{cite web |author=Tova Green |date=6 May 2010 |title=12 ימים|language=he |trans_title=13 days |publisher=Maybe So |url=http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html |accessdate=15 May 2010}}	Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
{{cite web |author=Tova Green |date=6 May 2010 |title=<bdi lang="he" dir="rtl">12 ימים</bdi> |language=he |trans_title=13 days |publisher=Maybe So |url=http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html |accessdate=15 May 2010}}	Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
{{cite web |author=Tova Green |date=6 May 2010 |title=12 ימים |language=he |trans_title=<bdi dir="ltr">13 days</bdi> |publisher=Maybe So |url=http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html |accessdate=15 May 2010}}	Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
{{cite web |author=Tova Green |date=6 May 2010 |title=<bdi lang="he" dir="rtl">12 ימים</bdi> |language=he |trans_title=<bdi dir=ltr>13 days</bdi> |publisher=Maybe So |url=http://MaybeSo.com/12days.html |accessdate=15 May 2010}}	Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)

--  Gadget850 ^talk 01:00, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Gadget850: Yes, it appears that <bdi> works better than <span>. If the rtl |title= parameter is tagged with bdi, the English |trans_title= parameter displays correctly without additional markup. But still, protecting the rtl |title= parameter with <span> should also work, and the second bullet is still a bug in my opinion. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:41, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Either of these solutions will bugger up the COinS metadata. Here's the COinS title when it's wrapped with <bdi>...</bdi>:

&rft.btitle=%3Cbdi+lang%3D%22he%22+dir%3D%22rtl%22%3E12+%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D%3C%2Fbdi%3E

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:04, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I knew that would happen, but it does show a route to the solution. I logged a feature request some time ago for better language support, including RTL support. <bdi> was whitelisted since that request. We should not need to do anything to 'trans_title' as it should be English. --  Gadget850 ^talk 12:52, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Just notice the the last example uses dir=ltr missing the quotes so it doesn't do anything.

The issue occurs because 'title' and 'trans_title' are combined to create the link. Looking at this, I can't see a downside of wrapping the title in <bidi> in the template to isolate the directionality of 'title' from 'trans_title'. If we add that, then we should go on and add the language code as well, which has been on the suggestion list for a while. --  Gadget850 ^talk 12:23, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia cannot assume that the |title= parameter is entered in the language declared in the |language= parameter. Wikipedia editors sometimes translate the title to English when using the |language= parameter. I do this myself sometimes, especially if the title is just a name or otherwise the same in English and Hebrew, such as "Halleluyah". So I would advise against adding language codes around the |title= parameter, and <bdi>...</bdi> codes should not specify the direction. —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:59, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Then we can't fix the issue with italicized Asian characters in a title. --  Gadget850 ^talk 10:29, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

There has been no discussion under this heading of italicized Asian characters in a title. This is a discussion of rtl languages mixing with various symbols such as numbers and whether those symbols appear to the left or right of rtl language characters. —Anomalocaris (talk) 04:24, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

unicode-bidi: isolate;, people:

Tova Green (6 May 2010). "12 ימים" (in Hebrew). Maybe So. Retrieved 15 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)

Unicode 7.0 gives us also U+2068 and U+2069. — Keφr 21:23, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Adding <span style="unicode-bidi: -moz-isolate; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; unicode-bidi: -ms-isolate; unicode-bidi: isolate;">...</span> corrupts the COinS metadata. Certainly, something like this could be added to the rendered version of the citation (output of Module:Citation/CS1) but editors should not add it to |title= or |trans-title=.

And doesn't <span style="unicode-bidi: -moz-isolate; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; unicode-bidi: -ms-isolate; unicode-bidi: isolate;">...</span> do the same thing that <bdi>...</bdi> is supposed to do?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:24, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Oh, I read that as <bdo>. But indeed it does. And there is no difference compatibility-wise either, according to MDN. I learned something new. — Keφr 12:39, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decisions (original)

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

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

• Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer
• Letter on change.org

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

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

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

Abandonment of Reflinks

• There is no reason to disable Reflinks [1] and other useful tools just to make people come here and sign a petition. I believe community consensus would be to keep those tools working. Be rather hypocritical to force your will upon others, in order to make them protest someone else doing the same thing here. Dream Focus 00:20, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: It appears that Dispenser's tools were blocked by the WMF, not taken offline to encourage petition signing. GoingBatty (talk) 00:52, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

First they just have the protest encouragement there, then suddenly they are blocked. No reason to block them though, not with such popular tools being used for years now. Just happened the moment they tried protesting. I find it unlikely it can be unrelated. Dream Focus 00:57, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

You may think it unlikely, but it is unrelated. It came to the attention of the admins that Dispenser was violating the Labs Terms of use, in particular in having and running non-free software. He was asked to remove such software and refused, hence the block and the message GoingBatty linked. Some of the conversation leading up to this situation is in the #wikimedia-labs logs starting around timestamp 19:42:50. Anomie⚔ 01:58, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

It is indeed unrelated. — Dispenser 03:34, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

So much for IAR. I rely heavily on Reflinks. Too bad that WMF didn't consider the value of these tools to the project before simply switching them off. - MrX 15:43, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

• This WMF action also includes the shut down of two of Dispenser's tools used on the DYK nomination templates: Dab links and Checklinks. — Maile (talk) 16:13, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
  • WMF's response reminds me of Dogma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=556RU1jPdIc.--v/r - TP 01:03, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
    • Reply - Bring back Reflinks! That is all! --Jax 0677 (talk) 06:56, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
    • Reply Bring back Reflinks. It is an invaluable tool and I relied on it. It is too onerous to convert footnotes from bare URLs manually and the number of those in the pages I work on are piling up at a great rate as users are too lazy to use the Wiki cite templates. --P123ct1 (talk) 08:36, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• Missing this tool: I am missing this tool. This has been a very useful one. (after reading this notice) --Tito☸Dutta 17:11, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  • • Reply Yes. Bring back Reflinks. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:41, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• @Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Jax 0677, P123ct1, Titodutta, and Maile66: if you read up you'll see that the tool shutdown has nothing to do with the superprotect right or Dispenser's opinion on it; he shut them down in a fit of pique after he was banned from labs, quite rightfully, for hosting non-free software in direct violation of the labs terms of use. Ironholds (talk) 04:36, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

• @Ironholds: thank you. Looks like I did not read the main post here. The tool is a useful one and I was missing it and got this thread's link in a notice (linked in my last post, just above). Why are they linking this thread, if it is unrelated? (posted using android) --Tito☸Dutta 04:49, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

  I don't know; that's a question for Dispenser. I'd guess either a continuation of said fit of pique, or a feeling that superprotect and his banning are linked in consisting of "occasions on which the WMF has said no to something" (which I don't think is a decent comparison, since in the case of the banning, what they said no to was 'terms of use violations', but..) Ironholds (talk) 11:38, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Ironholds, well however and why ever things happened, the fact remains that Dispenser had tools that are needed. If Dispenser is not providing these at this time, perhaps WMF can provide replacements:

1) Reflinks

2) Dablinks

3) Dabsolver

4) Webcheck links

5) Watcher

— Maile (talk) 18:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

No idea; I don't make WMF product decisions. These tools are widely used, yes (I use them); I think the answer is for them to be resurrected by someone not interested in violating the site's TOU. Ironholds (talk) 02:00, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@Ironholds: Or perhaps it isn't Dispenser who doesn't know why he is angry but the WMF. Perhaps it is superprotect and NOT his WMF Labs ban that has spurred this action. Afterall, it's not like it wasn't a piece of cake for him to set up his own web hosting. Seems more logical that he would protest something he can't control, like superprotect, than something that is quite easy for him to overcome.--v/r - TP 18:32, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Or perhaps he refuses to change his behaviour and so the two are roughly analogous. It's kind of irrelevant; we're just hypothesising here. The fact that his ban is complained about in BIG LETTERS and superprotect in small letters is indicative, however. Ironholds (talk) 02:00, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I thought the superprotect message was already there, and he added the message in big letters when he was banned from toolserver. (I thought it was in big letters to differentiate it as more directly relevant, though this doesn't seem to be very successful.) Anyway, this is kind of off topic. —PC-XT+ 05:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I've just hacked together a non-VE client to the Citoid server which hopefully does a similar job to reflink. Just add importScript('User:Salix alba/Citoid.js'); to your Special:MyPage/skin.js. It uses mw:citoid service and borrows heavily from the VE interface User:Mvolz/veCiteFromURL. It works by adding a toolbox link, click on this and you get a dialog popup where you can enter a url, submit it to the server and get a citation template as a result. See User:Salix alba/Citoid for details.

Its very much an pre-alpha release, virtually untested but worked for the first two urls I tried. Very much open source, people are encouraged to clone adapt to their own needs.--Salix alba (talk): 16:41, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Congratulations, you've just done a hell of a lot more for Wikipedia content than the WMF has done in months. KonveyorBelt

Credit should really go to @Mvolz: who been working on Citoid as part of Wikimedia's mw:FOSS Outreach Program for Women.--Salix alba (talk): 22:10, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Sadly, Marielle's summer program has officially ended. The Editing team will be supporting the rest of the work. I've used it in my volunteer account for VisualEditor; see this diff for how to enable it in your own account. The important thing to note is that this is still at the strictly experimental stage. It is unlikely to corrupt any pages (it shouldn't save anything on its own), but the service could fall over at any moment. If that happens, it should restart on its own, but it is really not ready for high-volume use. Feel free to leave feedback at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback even if you're using it in the wikitext editor; Salix alba and I both frequently look in at that page.

Once it is stable, the ultimate plan is to make it available for both VisualEditor and the wikitext editor at all WMF projects. Outside of the biggest, very few of them have any citation filling scripts at the moment, so this will be a big improvement in the end. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:36, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): "The Editing team will be supporting the rest of the work." What does this mean? Do you have project milestones, dates, etc.? --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:48, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

That depends, NeilN: Do you believe timelines written by people whose job titles include the word "manager" or "director"? If so, then it will allegedly be deployed (in at least a minimal fashion) for VisualEditor (only) at the end of September. More realistically, I expect it to be up and running in VisualEditor later this calendar year. I've not been told a date for extending it to the wikitext editor; all I've heard is that it will happen after it's running in VisualEditor.

I'm not certain about the current status, but a couple of weeks ago, it needed work on service stability and a way to make it generalizable or customizable. Stability has improved since then, but has it improved enough for regular use on a very large wiki like this one? I just don't know. I've not heard anything about the rest of the work. (How to convert each URL into a ref was hardcoded in the software back in July. This is okay as a temporary measure, when you're working on keeping the thing up and running, but it's very bad for long-term use and for expansion.) I don't have enough information to know whether they'll meet this original target, but they're really not shy about having the schedule slip. It will get rolled out when the devs believe that it's reasonably ready, not when some manager's timeline says it should be ready. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

• Reflinks, Dablinks, Dabsolver, Webcheck link, Watcher. These are tools that the community uses to help improve Wikipedia on a daily basis and has repeatedly said is important to their workflow process. Is there a good reason that after all this time, we don't have native tools that perform the same or similar tasks? Why isn't the WMF listening? Is it because they no longer represent the community? Viriditas (talk) 20:39, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Wholly support preceding comment by Viriditas. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:49, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Linked without further comment: [2] --NeilN ^{talk to me} 21:06, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Why are we going through all this again? As I noted at 23:24, 1 July 2014 (two months ago), and also at 20:34, 2 July 2014, it is not the job of the WMF to provide gadgets (or other user scripts); they are kind enough to provide hardware where such tools may be hosted, something that they are not obliged to do. It is us, the community, who provide and maintain the gadgets. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:25, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

They shutdown the Toolserver hosting the gadgets, did they not? You can't have it both ways, and somebody must take responsibility for the overwhelming pattern here: the most important tools used by editors are made unavailable while the most bothersome tools that nobody wants are shoved down our throats. You can't escape these facts. Furthermore, while it is certainly a great idea to make everything open source, that consideration should take place before shutting down tools, not after. Putting the cart before the horse benefits nobody. And let's apply this logic to reality. If everything were required to be open source, would we have even evolved as a technological civilization? Would the computer have ever been built? Would we have ever visited the Moon? Designed the telephone? This management style is best described as cutting off the nose to spite the face. Viriditas (talk) 22:49, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

No. WMF did not shut down Toolserver: Wikimedia Deutschland did. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:54, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Wow. That's a serious reality distortion field you've got going on there. Luckily, I can avoid it by setting up a force field like this: [3][4] When you step inside the field, you see this: "Toolserver is in fact hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation...We provide space, power and racks for the toolserver cluster, at a cost of about $65,000/year to WMF according to our Director of TechOps. We also maintain the database replication on our end which enables tools to function....We can't provide the same level of service for the toolserver infrastructure as we do for core operations, and it makes no sense for a chapter to build out the required staffing and expertise to do so (set up/maintain all or some of the aforementioned functions). Even with slightly increased investment, toolserver would always suffer from being second or third tier infrastructure...We're not comfortable hosting the toolserver infrastructure as-is.." Viriditas (talk) 23:02, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

You seem to not be understanding what you're quoting there, Viriditas. Toolserver was run, administered, and (mostly?) paid for by Wikimedia Deutschland. WMF provided space for WMDE's servers in one of their caching datacenters, as well as some technical support (i.e. the database replication feed). When WMDE didn't want to continue to be responsible for the Toolserver, WMF did not want to take it on as-is for various good technical reasons; instead they used the Labs infrastructure they were already setting up to create a "Toolserver 2.0" that would improve on some of the shortcomings of the original Toolserver. Unfortunately there were some people who liked some of those shortcomings (e.g. the lack of a requirement for open-source licenses on all tools, the fact that it was subject to German/European laws, and so on), and they've raised both valid issues and FUD about the situation. Anomie⚔ 23:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I understood what I read perfectly, and anyone can read it in its original context. The WMF shut down the Toolserver because they wanted to migrate to Labs. That's perfectly clear, and you can argue semantics like an attorney until the cows come home. WMF funded it and hosted it, and made the decision to shut it down through various means. The link is very clear about this: "Chapters are autonomous organizations, and it's WM-DE's call how much whether it wants to continue to invest in infrastructure of any kind (and the decision of funding bodies like the FDC to accept or reject that proposition). However, for our part, we will not continue to support the current arrangement (DB replication, hosting in our data-center, etc.) indefinitely." So, in other words, the WMF made a decision to stop supporting what users want and to start supporting things like Meda Viewer, Visual Editor - things that users don't want. But please, do continue to piss on my leg and tell me that it's raining. Viriditas (talk) 23:45, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

If you claim you understood what you read perfectly and have rejected my clarification, than I can only conclude that you are one of the people spreading FUD about the situation. Please stop, your drama is not helping matters any. Anomie⚔ 23:50, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

What is this, a totalitarian state run by the WMF? Will you now call for my arrest (ANI) and subsequent execution (indefinite block)? You've reached an all time low. Viriditas (talk) 23:52, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Really? I thought my all-time low on Wikipedia was probably this from back in 2008, which I see has since been deleted. This is nowhere near that one. Anomie⚔ 00:17, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Viriditas, uh. You know that labs provides the same service as Toolserver, right? Better, in fact. Ironholds (talk) 12:48, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I want to apologize for the delay in my reply. I was very busy laughing, so hard in fact, I almost broke a rib. Are you telling me that you interrupted your busy labor day holiday to tell me that labs provides superior service, so superior that it can't even run Reflinks, Dablinks, Dabsolver, Webcheck links, and Watcher? Is that what you are telling me? I am sorry to tell you this, but Dilbert is a cartoon, it was not meant to be taken literally. This may come as quite a shock to you, but please prepare yourself: the Pointy-Haired Boss is the antagonist, not the hero. Viriditas (talk) 22:44, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

What on earth are you talking about? All of those tools were runnable. They functioned perfectly. Dispenser quit because he was trying to host and run copyrighted, proprietary, third-party software in an effort to steganographically go through uploads. Everything else he wrote worked within the labs environment. If labs was that broken it wouldn't host everything else we use.

I'm hearing a lot of certainty from you: I'm not hearing a lot of facts. You should go get your rib looked at: perhaps they could do a quick spot check on your bile duct, too. Ironholds (talk) 06:32, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Unbelievable. Talk about missing the point by a parsec. In any case, the pattern here is clear for anyone to see. Whenever an editor, any editor says "where are the tools we need?" the response from the Foundation employees and their retinue of sycophants is "it's your fault, it's his fault, she did it, he did it, I didn't do it, they did it, someone else did it, and I'm not responsible". Every time. Nobody seems to take responsibility ever. All we get are excuses. I frankly, don't give a damn about these tools. I'm here (and on other noticeboards) representing the dozens of editors who do care, and I'm making their voice heard by repeating myself over and over again until someone over there finally gets it. Those tools are not running on the labs servers now, and that's the point you missed. I don't give two fucks how you get them running, and I'm tired of the litany of excuses blaming other people for your inability to service the needs of the community. Viriditas (talk) 08:11, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

And I'm tired of people who think that volume makes up for not having anything of value to say, or any valid way of saying it. The WMF's only involvement in any of these tools was creating a hosting environment for those tools to live on; it didn't take up responsibility to keep any piece of volunteer code anyone wrote running. If someone takes their blog down in a fit of pique, do you shout at the web hosting company because your favorite site doesn't exist any more? No, because creating a space for code does not equate to maintaining said code. If you were looking to communicate "the tools are down, why can't the tools come back up", you picked a pretty terrible way of doing it - and if you can't see how, you and the dozens of (clearly invisible, if you feel the need to speak for them) editors you apparently represent can get together and maybe try to come up with some hypothesis for why perhaps your messages above were read as impolite, histrionic and ignorant of the facts.

By the way: there's no "your" or "you" here. I'm not speaking here for the WMF: I've got absolutely nothing to do with Labs. I'm a researcher. I know why Dispenser's tools vanished because I read the logs Anomie posted in this thread five days ago. Evidently you didn't.

If you want to make the argument for using volunteer-created resources as a way of experimenting with things that should be taken over by the WMF and maintained for as long as there is a use for them, you want to go talk to the Editing team directly, as has already been suggested, not rant on a noticeboard in such a way as to drive away people who would otherwise be interested in helping. Personally, I'm done with this thread: there are some good conversations happening, but you and others like you have ensured it has become more heat than light. Ironholds (talk) 08:41, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

All I see in the above are more excuses, more bureaucratic filing of paperwork A with bureaucrat B down the hall in room C. WMF shut Toolserver down to push Labs, yet when the tools the community actually uses and depends on aren't a part of that transition, and the community gets upset about it, it isn't the fault of the WMF? It sounds like you have no use for the community. So you're a researcher, are you trying to figure out a way to automate editing so you can shut people like me up for good? That would solve your problem, wouldn't it. Automate the editing process entirely, get rid of the community and you can run the WMF in peace and quiet without any distractions from anyone. Then you can pat each other on the backs and take long coffee breaks as the bots write the articles and maintain the site. No more angry and disgruntled humans to deal with. Why deal with the dirty community who expects the WMF to represent their best interests when you can just phase them out and replace them with bots who will never complain? Viriditas (talk) 08:56, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Let me put it this way, by analogy. Your local shopping mall is severely damaged in a hurricane. The mall's owner wasn't insured, and can't afford to repair the damage. A new mall is built in the same town by a different company, and when it opens you visit it, only to find that there is no Abercrombie & Fitch. Who do you blame - the owner of the old mall, the owner of the new mall, the hurricane, or A&F? Or perhaps Abercrombie & Fitch did open a new store, but one day you arrive to find that it's closed because the staff are on strike for higher pay. Who do you blame? If your answer to either question is "the owner of the new mall", it's the wrong answer. It is not the responsibility of the WMF to provide tools that the tool writer has declined to support. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:08, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't need or require your false analogy, as I understand exactly what is going on. The WMF no longer has any use for the community. They've got their 20 million and they are good with that. Everyone else can fuck off now, and accept what they are given from up above without question, and if you complain, you'll be told to complain to someone over there and then someone over there, until you're running around in circles all day. The bureaucratic nightmare you've created (because bureaucracy serves only bureucracy, nothing else) is the end result. The community no longer matters. Ironholds' comments are so far from reality, they can only be described as fantasy. He actually called the numerous editors concerned about the missing tools in this very thread "clearly invisible". That is not just beyond the pale, it is indicative of a larger problem that needs to be addressed. These editors are not "clearly invisible" by any means. They are right here, in this thread, demanding that the tools return. They don't care about your ad hoc analogies, and they certainly don't feel better about having tools they don't want shoved down their throat. You can't rationalize this away and pretend it's not a problem. And I don't need to construct a bullshit excuse or analogy to explain the problem, I can tell you exactly what it is. The WMF is spending thousands on software nobody wants or needs and not a single goddamn penny on the tools Wikipedia editors require. Do you understand the problem yet, or do I and dozens of other editors need to explain it to you another hundred times? Do not respond here with another "it's not our problem" excuse, because it is your problem, and the community has told you about the problem over and over again. Make the tools work. Got it? Viriditas (talk) 09:37, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

You seem to be under the misapprehension that I'm somehow connected with the WMF. I'm not, although I did meet some of them a few weeks ago. Rant at me all you like: it won't make me provide any tools whatsoever, because I never intended to; and those who were considering doing so might be less inclined to assist. My concern is that too much blame is being directed at the wrong people. And for the last time: the WMF did not shut Toolserver down: WMDE did. Do you understand that? Like Ironholds, I'm done here. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:53, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

If you will read carefully, you will see that I did not refer to you as "connected" to the WMF. Dispenser claimed that the WMF shutdown the Toolserver and his interpretation of that action is supported by the linked documents above. Your literalist interpretation, however, as to who finally turned off the lights, avoids the central concerns and acts to deflect responsibility from the WMF. There seems to be a culture of avoidance at work here. That many users have expressed their concern with the loss of these tools only to be told they are "clearly invisible", shows that the WMF has completely lost touch with their core mission. Viriditas (talk) 19:19, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Or alternately it shows that (1) you're reading far too much into one editor's statements if you think it says anything about "The WMF" and (2) you don't understand that the immediate read on "I'm here (and on other noticeboards) representing the dozens of editors who do care, and I'm making their voice heard by repeating myself over and over again" suggests that you're talking for people who aren't talking themselves - IOW, people 'invisible' when you look at the conversation. The long ramble about automation is simply the icing on the cake; that's nothing to do with my work, and your needless hypothesising is, well, needless. Ironholds (talk) 19:32, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

That "long ramble", as you put it, is called satire, paying homage to "The Brain Center at Whipple's', as my edit summary referenced. And my observation about your bureaucratic tendencies refers to the film Brazil. You're still taking everything literally, I see. This thread is chock full of the "invisible" people asking for their tools back. I suggest you take a customer service training class, as you aren't very good dealing with real people. Viriditas (talk) 22:36, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose64: So you think the WMF should ignore user needs and do whatever they want. Got it. Hopefully this isn't the new consultative process Jimbo is talking about. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 23:00, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Technolibertarianism will always devolve into outright fascism. You can count on it. "Jünger like Marinetti emphasized the revolutionary capacities of technology, and emphasized an "organic construction" between human and machine as a liberating and regenerative force in that challenged liberal democracy, conceptions of individual autonomy, bourgeois nihilism, and decadence. He conceived of a society based on a totalitarian concept of "total mobilization" of such disciplined warrior-workers." Sounds familiar. Viriditas (talk) 23:59, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

when the checklinks tool work--Amt000 (talk) 02:57, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@NeilN: I said nothing of the sort. I said that Wikimedia Deutschland shut down Toolserver. That is a fact, not an opinion on what the WMF should (or should not) be doing. There is a big difference between an organisation taking away a service that they had previously provided, but which the community found useful, and an organisation not giving us something that they had not previously provided, but which the community does want. That WMF chose to provide an alternative hosting service (well over a year earlier) in the form of Labs is to our benefit, not our loss. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:03, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

• Interesting how the topic of this discussion has been side-railed and never managed to quite get back on track. For the record, I support the addition of superprotect when used to enforce page locks for official office actions (like the legal team protecting a version of the page for legal reasons), and think that we should use our WP:BLACKLOCK for this protection level in templates and userscripts. Speaking of which, is this change live on enwp someplace and a test page protected with it so I can update my script to include it? Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 14:05, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
  • As far as I know, superprotect has only been used to protect one page on any production wiki, ever. It's possible that it is available on one of the test wikis if you'd like to do some testing for you scripts.
    On a slightly related point, if someone would like to figure out what's got screwed up at the Javanese Wikipedia (see File:Screen_Shot_jv.wp_2014-07-04_at_10.16.31_AM.png), that would be helpful. It's probably something about the site notices. I've asked the admins there, and they have no idea how to fix it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:24, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
• Probably off-topic but as Reflinks is currently down, and the "consider signing the petition" link on its page links to this section, I'll just post this here: Reflinks is absolutely vital and it should be fixed or an adequate replacement found as soon as possible, there is currently no other tool that offers the same amount of functionality as Reflinks does that doesn't involve tediously fixing bare URLs manually to some degree. Satellizer (´ ･ ω ･ `) 12:10, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
• I was a bit fed up about this being used to hijack the superprotect discussion, so I've separated them. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 14:35, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
• Please restore Reflinks. It is very useful. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 22:56, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

• Agreed, they need to put their differences aside, and get these tools back up for the sake of Wikipedia. If it never comes back, i can't see myself filling refs again. Koala15 (talk) 23:53, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

• Please bring Dabsolver back. DuncanHill (talk) 17:40, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
• Regardless of the reason why we're at this point without Reflinks and the like, I've concluded that the more WMF gets involved the worse the situation gets. Wikipedia works better when WMF does nothing but collect donations and keep the servers up. Everything else they've done makes the work of editors harder. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:06, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

• I need reflinks. This is just petty and sad. :(--Coin945 (talk) 19:42, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

WikiWand, images and blockquotes

From Night (book)#Sighet ghettos. The question is what I need to do to get it to look more like the same section in WikiWand?

Using {{quotation}}, the blockquotes end up in the right place, but the template doesn't seem to have many features. One quote is behind an image, and I can't find a way to remove the border or change size or colour.

File:Night with quote box.jpg

{{Quote box}} has more features, but the images push the text out of the way, and the blockquotes end up paragraphs lower than intended.

Same section on WikiWand

I've been looking at some of our articles through WikiWand, and they really do look better, especially with the larger images and the pale-grey blockquotes.

I'm currently trying to edit Night (book) to look more like its WikiWand version. One of the issues I'm struggling with is how to create coloured blockquotes around images using {{quote}} or {{quote box}}. Sometimes they work, and sometimes the quote goes spinning off into weird places, several paragraphs below where I intended it, even splitting paragraphs in two.

Does anyone know how to exercise more control over blockquote placement around images so that we can have different colours, widths and fonts? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:05, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

I installed it because I trust your name, and was disappointed to see that the articles are not current. Thank you for the tip.

But if I use the menu in the header, I can edit via the familiar way, and I was able to see some current changes.

Wow. power projection looks fantastic. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 16:51, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi Ancheta, it looks great, doesn't it? (The articles I've looked at have been current, btw). Take a look at List of colors and Ezra Pound. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 17:24, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

By "coloured blockquotes" do you mean something like {{Centered pull quote}}? --  Gadget850 ^talk 17:27, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

{{Quotation}} probably does what you want. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:23, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Gadget, thanks but that produces something different. WAID, {{Quotation}} has the same conflict with images as {{Quote box}} (the former sometimes ends up behind the image, while the latter pushes it out of the way). There is something odd about the way images are displayed on WP and it has caused problems for years. The question is how can we produce blockquotes (and other design features) the way WikiWand does, without these image clashes.

WAID, do you know who is in charge of design for the Foundation? Perhaps we could ping that person for advice. Pinging Missvain, as I know she has talked about design a lot. I'd love to know who we need to ask and what we need to ask for. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 18:34, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

I think User talk:Jaredzimmerman (WMF) would be the relevant director. User:Jorm is working on Winter, so he's probably the best designer to talk to. There's some work in train (October?) to change the design of all image boxes, but I don't remember who is working on that. Fabrice is probably the PM for it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:49, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

{{Stack}} may be useful here. --  Gadget850 ^talk 19:35, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

And if it is, we could add the functionality into {{quotation}}. --  Gadget850 ^talk 19:54, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Would you be willing to do that, Gadget? (I ask that not knowing how much work it is.) We need to be able to remove the border or change the thickness, change colour, change width – everything that {{quote box}} does. Or else fix quote box so that it doesn't move images. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:00, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Please don't use {{Stack}}. It's an ugly workaround and needs to be avoided whenever possible. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 21:18, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

@SlimVirgin: you may find some designers on mail:design. Helder 20:33, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Many thanks, Helder! SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:55, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Gadget850, as you seem to know what you're doing, could I ask you to help with something?

I am thinking of asking the Foundation formally somewhere (perhaps on Bugzilla, if that's the right place) to create tools for us so that we can create articles that look more like WikiWand.

I first want to make sure that we can't already do it with the tools we have. I've spent hours struggling with Night (book) (particularly Night (book)#Sighet ghettos) to juggle the blockquotes and the images, but I can't get them to sit right. Here is one example of what happens. If you look at the block quote beginning "The barbed wire which fenced us in ..." that is supposed to come after "the windows on the non-ghetto side had to be boarded up." But instead it jumps several paragraphs, and positions itself in the middle of another quote.

Would you mind briefly trying to position the block quotes (with a grey background and no border) in that section with the images, just in case I'm missing something? If you can't manage it, can you tell me what we need to ask the Foundation to create for us, so that this kind of thing can be done relatively easily? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:52, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

BTW. if anyone is bored... There should be some serious weeding/deletion/replacement done in Category:Quotation_templates. About half the templates are duplicates or easily replaceable variants. Really just too many cruft there, what are you supposed to use as a user ? —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 21:05, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Anything that is <blockquote> based should now no longer overlap with images on the mobile site (we might propagate that change into the entire site, it seems like a sane idea, but let's test it on mobile first). Anything that is table based (like cquote variants), should probably be avoided. Also I see you experimented with a few quotes that were left floating, which is probably not what you wanted. You wanted left aligned, that is different than left floating (unfortunately many template params are incorrectly named on this front, so it can be hard to tell without pulling out a web inspector or reading the template code). —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 21:26, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Same section on WikiWand

Hi Derek-Jan, my problem (which I share with a lot of editors) is that I can't describe what I want, and I don't understand the language (floating, aligned, blockquote, cquote, table-based). I can only point to the outcome I'd like to achieve, which is the WikiWand look (right), so that I can place blockquotes in text boxes, with borders and no borders, different colours, different widths, where I want to place them, including next to images.

It has been a problem for years on WP that we can't do this. I've often seen editors struggling to try to produce something decent looking. We'd love to be able to write for a professional-looking publication. The typography refresh was great, as are the hovercards and the way thumbnails are shown now without the borders. And I love the look of the mobile site. Allowing us to move images and block quotes around more easily would be wonderful too.

I've written on the gender gap task force page that I see this as an editor-retention – and specifically a gender gap – issue, because I think the fiddly nature of trying to change the look of anything on a WP page is discouraging (for anyone, but I'd say especially for women). So the question is whether the Foundation might be willing to devote some resources to this. Who do we ask, and where, and what should we ask for? Pinging Erik in the hope he can advise. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:30, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Jumping in to second what SV has said above. I would think that it shouldn't be difficult for block quotes to have background shading and it shouldn't be difficult to have markup to specify whether a blockbox should be left/right aligned. The default for a <blockquote></blockquote> is center aligned, without background shading, and it never center aligns well if an image is in the vicinity (in other words only indents once, when a second indent is required if butting up against an image). If that helps, in terms of SV is trying to say. Victoria (tk) 00:17, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

SlimVirgin, please have a look at this Old revision of my sandbox and see if that will do approximately what you want. It'd just be a matter of copying and pasting the ugly div line before every block quote, and typing the closing div tag at the end. It's not perfect: I don't know how to make the blocks automatically full-width when nothing is on the right hand side, or to make them narrower when there is no text filling the full width (instead, they're all set to the width that seems to work if there's a regular-width image on the right-hand side; you can manually change that by adjusting the "20em" in the right margin code). However, I think it might be a little closer than what you've got, and perhaps someone else will be able to improve on it.

If you want more 'air' around the quotations (to have them indented more, either left or right), then that would be easy to add. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:58, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not SV, but decided to reply here anyway. For those of us who work here as volunteers writing content, and particularly for those of us who write about literature, blockquotes are almost impossible to avoid, yet most of us know that they're ugly and hard to format. I'd think it wouldn't be difficult to create a blockquote template with an option to align left, right or center, that would highlight the quote with background shading, that gives and option to change the color, and an option to change the width accordingly - necessary when in the vicinity of an image. We have a gazillion templates that do all kinds of things in article space and in talk space - right down to wikibreak and barnstar templates - yet something that's really a necessity in many many articles is lacking. It is discouraging to see that Wikiwand formats these so nicely but it's so hard for us to do here with the existing UI. Victoria (tk) 19:15, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, thank you so much for this – your sandbox looks exactly like the thing I was trying to achieve. I'll take some time today to try to apply it to the whole article.

As Victoria says, for people writing content it's really hard to find the technical help if we don't know how to write code ourselves, or know how to choose between the various templates. It seems – for the most part (with apologies to the exceptions) – that WP volunteers with technical skills have not focused on design, and editors who care about the look of pages may not have the technical background. The question is how we can encourage the Foundation to bridge the gap so that all editors have access to tools to make pages look good. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:55, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, I've finished adding your boxes to Night (book), and they look really good. Thanks again for creating them! One thing I would like to be able to do is move some of them to the centre, but I don't know what to write (e.g. with "He's just trying to make us pity him .."

I wonder if the Foundation would pay someone to teach editors how to write the kind of code we need to understand these things. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:11, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Break

The main problem with the approach taken by WhatamIdoing at 05:58, 27 August 2014 is that the chosen dimensions might not suit everybody's setup. The blockquote is constrained to avoid the images by setting its right margin to 20em; but are the images necessarily 20em (or just under) wide? If they're |thumb images, they might be anything from 120px to 300px wide (depending on the setting at Preferences → Appearance), plus the frame that goes with a |thumb image. The relationship between dimensions measured in em and those measured in px is inexact, and depends on several factors ranging from the hardware characteristics to the installed fonts. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:52, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Also, it uses divs, which is not a good idea.. If i have some time this weekend, I might want to take a stab to cleanup some of this mess in the quote templates area. Really, it can all be fixed easily, it's just that people have made a bit of a mess of everything. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 10:28, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I agree with TheDJ. I have done some work in the past, but the quote templates are inconsistently implemented. We might need some CSS changes to make this work properly. --  Gadget850 ^talk 11:02, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

How about this: Template:Block quote/sandbox —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 12:14, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I think it's quite good. Test here. I'd like to test throughout an entire article but won't get to that for a few days. Thanks for doing this. Victoria (tk) 00:31, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Bland. I hear the mobile style version is coming soon anyway: no background and big quotes (a bit like {{cquote}}) and in serif. Until then:

...inspired by {{talkquote}}. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:42, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

File:Night quote box overlap.jpg

Box overlapping an image

Edokter, thanks for creating that. I really like the left-hand border. I tried it out on this section of Night, and it worked with two of the images, but it overlapped with a third. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:56, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

SlimVirgin, I don't see the overlap (which should not happen due to this change in Common.css). Oh wait, I do see it in both Firefox and Opera (<15). It seems the overflow rule is not quite effective for floating elements following the blockquote. Some strategically placed {{-}}s is the only solution I can see for this. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:01, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi Edokter, I've uploaded a screenshot in case others can't see the overlap. Your boxes did work with two of the images though. I wonder why it's positioned differently around that particular image. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:44, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Depends on where the image is located with regards to the blockquote. Images pushed below the blockquote (even if they appear before the blockquote in the document flow) seem to be problematic. However, it is a rare occurence, and a {{clear}} or {{-}} will fix it. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 23:08, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

I've just added (using preview, didn't save) a {{clear}} under the blockquote that overlapped the image. It didn't remove the overlap, but it did add lots of white space below the next paragraph. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:27, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Try above the blockquote. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 23:31, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, this particular issue is a known side-effect with stacking floating elements of unequal width (and works as it is supposed to according to the specifications, tough newer versions of Chrome seem to have deviated from the standards for sake of better rendering). The only ways to fix this are by using either equal width floating elements, or wrapping the floating elements in an additional 'parent' floating element (like what {{Stack}} does, or by making sure that the 'wider' floating elements is defined at a location that logically is 'after' the block quote. None of them are really nice, but these are sort of the limits of what you can achieve with HTML. You'll note that WikiWand will also run into this problem. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 16:39, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

The thing I'm struggling with conceptually is why text and <blockquote> adjust themselves around images, but these other ways of producing quote boxes don't. Could someone explain that to me in words of one syllable? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:31, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

I added the style to avoid collisions with thumbnails into the en.wp core styling. I want to move some defaults structure into a 'quote/core" template and then have the various quotation templates with styling reuse that one. Then try to get rid of a lot of the other stuff. Also it would really help if I can have some use case descriptions. So independent of what are the current options, i'd like to know what you are looking for in terms of styling, positioning, content options etc. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 12:37, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

That looks much easier to use. Does "avoid collisions with thumbnails" mean that the text will now all be in the correct order? WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:19, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

TheDJ, we're looking for quote boxes we can use alongside images, where (ideally) we can control the width, colour, borders, margin width, font and font size, line breaks (for poetry), and above all where there won't be clashes with images – i.e. quote boxes we can position above, below and next to images, without the box overlapping the images, or appearing paragraphs below the position we tried to add it to. And a page with examples, where it's all explained (to get this look, do this), so that editors with no technical knowledge that use them easily. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:02, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

The road to block quote cleanup

I have started an overview page on this really annoying area and it is here: User:TheDJ/quotation_cleanup. This is gonna take quite a while, those experienced with template cleanup/subsitution/replacement that are willing to help, please do help :) —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 20:20, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

TheDJ, thank you for doing this. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 05:24, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Draft pages polluting content categories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redirects to sections

Resolved

Can't seem to get these to work today. Try for example 1 (numeral) and Anchor Books. Click on them and they take you to the TOP of their articles rather than to their sections. Go to the redirects and click on their targets, and you will be taken to the correct sections. Hmm? – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 22:19, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I just checked this in Firefox and it works okay. So why has it suddenly stopped working in IE10? – Paine  22:30, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm, seems like the opposite of Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 129#Redirects to subsections. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:32, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Haven't found a bug report like this, yet. Guess I'll check some more and perhaps open a report after lunch. Thank you very much, Redrose64, for your response! – Paine  00:30, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

I've just come across Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)#Why did this happen? Following a redirected link would previously leave the browser's URL bar showing the redirect - for example, clicking WP:VPT would leave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VPT in the address bar, but now it is fully expanded, presumably server-side, to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical) Perhaps there was a MediaWiki change which has an effect on section redirects? --Redrose64 (talk) 08:17, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Matma Rex changed the way we handle these redirects (all client side though). It seems however that IE10 is not updating the position in the page based on the hash that is pushed using history.replaceState.. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 11:31, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much, TheDJ! – Paine  14:21, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Yes, a software change; that's what I thought, too. Those poor devs have such a backlog! It's no wonder that they don't always thoroughly test their updates. It's always a balance between the tremendous workload and time. I just hope it can be fixed, which will keep me from having to check each expected section redirect to see if it is targeted correctly, to see if an anchor must be applied, and so on. Thank you, Redrose64, for your help and diligence! – Paine  14:21, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

For checking, you can (for now?) use the "show redirects only" link in whatlinkshere: [5] (an example with invalid links: [6]) --NE2 01:12, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the report, I filed Template:Bug and will look into it today. Matma Rex talk 14:09, 29 August 2014 (UTC) By the way, this change was supposed to be announced in latest Tech News (issue 35) (I added it to the issue: [7]), but it has been removed from some reason. I was under the impression that everyone knows that this happened :/ Matma Rex talk 14:15, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Excellent! Thank you so much, Matma Rex! – Paine  15:10, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

There's a patch with a workaround pending review now: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/157165/. I'll try to get it deployed soon, but it might be difficult to get it done on Friday :). If you're bored, you might try the three test cases linked in the description and verify that they behave like I described. Matma Rex talk 16:18, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

And now you can test the accepted patch on http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/. Matma Rex talk 16:57, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Should be fixed here, too! Sorry about the bug. Matma Rex talk 18:34, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

It is! and thank you so much for what you did! – Paine  19:11, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

For the record, the change ended up being announced in Tech News 36 instead. Matma Rex talk 11:58, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Phoenician font

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

URL changes when I am on a redirect

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

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

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

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

Progress template

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suppress MediaWiki:Newarticletext

Can I stick something in my .css to suppress this? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:53, 31 August 2014 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: The following should do it:

#newarticletext { display: none; }

Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 02:10, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Many thanks! I do worry about all this style sheet overhead. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:12, 1 September 2014 (UTC).

Watchlisting pages in a category

Is there a way to watchlist all pages in a category without going to them individually? Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 02:13, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

You can list the pages in your userspace (for example, at User:Callanecc/Watchlist), and then check recent changes to the listed pages.

—Wavelength (talk) 02:31, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

For that matter, it seems that Special:RecentChangesLinked will do the right thing when given a category. Anomie⚔ 02:46, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

As a one-time addition to your watchlist (or a process manually repeated at intervals), you could go to Special:EditWatchlist/raw and paste in the list of pages from the category. Or if you're familiar with the API, it should be easy to do with action=watch and generator=categorymembers. But if you're wanting to automatically add and remove pages as they're added to and removed from the category, there's no good way at this time; the Special:RecentChangesLinked trick is your best bet there. Anomie⚔ 02:46, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Best page to explain the Vector skin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech News: 2014-36

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

Recent software changes

• You can now test a new Beta Feature to see links to other wikis in the sidebar. The links come from Wikidata. [8] [9]
• You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the linksto: keyword in your search. [10] [11]
• A redirect to a section now changes the URL in the address bar of your browser. If "Dog" redirects to "Animals#Dog", you now see "Animals#Dog" instead of "Dog#Dog". [12] [13]
• If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages". [14]

VisualEditor news

• You can no longer delete required fields in templates. [15]
• We fixed many Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 11, you will get VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [16] [17] [18]
• VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook. [19]
• We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X). [20]
• You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category. [21]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf19) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 2, and on all Wikipedias on September 4 (calendar).
• There is a proposal to build a database on Commons for file data. It will make it easier to see the author, license and topics. You can give feedback on this idea. You can also come to the IRC chat on September 3 at 18:00 (UTC) in #wikimedia-office at freenode. [22]
• You can give feedback on Media Viewer until September 7. You can say what needs to be improved and ask other people to give feedback too. [23]
• You can test a new version of the tool to show math. It uses MathML. Report bugs in bugzilla.
• You will no longer be able to upload images from the mobile site. [24]

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

07:49, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Deleting Election Box Metadata

I've been here for 9 years and STILL find this confusing, so please advise! The article Patriotic Socialist Party was deleted, but the related Election Box Metadata was not; how do we get rid of this and this ? Thanks. doktorb _words^deeds 10:07, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

WP:CSD#G8 seems appropriate. G6 could probably work too. Anomie⚔ 11:33, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Cheers User:Anomie, thanks for helping! doktorb _words^deeds 13:07, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia Android app: editing

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

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

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

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

OK, I fixed it, but the fix doesn't make sense. While the app was saying I was logged in, it seems I wasn't. Logging out and logging back in again permitted this edit [25] Thanks for trying to help! --Dweller (talk) 20:24, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Gender template / magic word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VE blocks Hangul.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72353

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• I did some testing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Contributors" link

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

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

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

• VPPR
• WT:MED

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon kindle 3G cannot login

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

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

New wikEdDiff / wDiff

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

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

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

Displaying Wikidata IDs

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

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

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

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

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

Problems searching WP:ANI archives

For some reason, archive searches don't seem to be working for WP:ANI - I spent some time trying to find the thread where this post [26] was archived, and ended up having to search the archive by hand to find it - in Archive 843. [27] The problem can be clearly demonstrated by searching for the thread header ("Re-evaluating admin decision from September 2013") in the 'Noticeboard archives' search field on the ANI page - it doesn't find the thread. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:44, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

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

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

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

I don't know the precise limit, or whether it's a precise limit at all, but in a test [28] I found Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive527#Vandalism by Sesshomaru near the end of a 406K page. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:00, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Problem with gadget that adds edit links to lead sections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indefinite protection no longer available

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

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

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

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

Possible error in MfD instructions

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

Move revision history problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edit summary interface stuff

Few things:

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

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

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

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

@Jason Quinn: Hey,

• For <Summary>, we should consider what's wrong with the default message ("Summary:") and consider resetting to that, or upstream the improvements we think are worthwhile for all languages, not just English. Note for example that people with "British English" as their interface language, like me, don't see the current value you think it's set to – instead we see [29] the default. We can play whack-a-mole and try to fix all of them, but…
• The <tooltip-ep-summary> message is a used by the Education Programme – not sure who's lead on that right now. Unfortunately the guidance about what it's used for isn't very helpful, and it appears like it's not used…
• I think the documentation for <tooltip-summary> is reasonably clear, but if you think it should be altered please fix it. :-)

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

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

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

Grants to improve your project

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

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

New design?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem with Wikipedia and Cleartype

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting re-cat hiccup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something is wrong with Wikimedia Commons and the images

Exhibit "A".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something is wrong with the files

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.

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

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

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

Commons images suddenly not appearing

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.

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

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

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

Local time template

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

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

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

AFD helper script

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

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

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

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

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

Just in case anyone here hasn't discovered this, you can watchlist redlinks. It's possible that my watchlist contains a couple of RFC/U pages that I suspect may be created some day. Of course, in this case, that trick won't help you if the script ends up on a different page, but it's something to consider. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:31, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Strange behaviour for deleted paged

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52829

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

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

tool for checking a list of articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contributors link on some Medicine articles

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

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

Emails not arriving

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

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

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

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

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

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

More eyes needed at Template talk:Authority control

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

Is there a tool to count redirects?

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

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

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

Altered number sign

Look at this:

See also: Turkey (bird) § Fossil record

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

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

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

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

For another demo, see Turkey (bird) § Fossil record.

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

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

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

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

Background color of navigation bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikilove broken?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72448

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

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

What happened to MonoBook skin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pages not loading properly

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

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

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

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

Notifications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Away

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