Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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

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Unresolved issue is archived - How to "UN-Archive"?

Greetings, A problem awaiting resolution is now archived here and tracked at phabricator:T126553.

If it's not possible to pull back from archive, does it need to be re-posted again?

Regards,  JoeHebda (talk)  19:04, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: Just post the new question, with a link back to the archived thread. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:39, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

If I re-post again here, will it be archived again before the issue is solved? Just wondering... JoeHebda (talk)  02:19, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Possibly; archiving bots do not take any notice of whether a thread has been replied to or not. Threads on this page are archived if they've not been posted to for five days. So if nobody responds here before the next bot run that occurs after 10:30, 5 March 2016 (UTC), it will be archived. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:30, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Redrose64 – Thanks for the update. Yesterday I did repost the new VPT archive link to Wikipedia talk:User scripts#Fix needed: Gadget only works with Vector skin, script error which was orginally posted on Feb. 15th. Wondering if there might be a better place to post where the issue can be fixed? Without waiting for months for a resolution? If I knew anything about scripts (which I do not) I would attempt to fix myself. Regards,  JoeHebda (talk)  13:39, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

1) ω Awaiting a solution – also see: MediaWiki:Gadget-mobile-sidebar and Wikipedia:Gadget.  JoeHebda (talk)  13:45, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: You can use {{DNAU}} to prevent archiving. nyuszika7h (talk) 21:26, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

2) ω Awaiting a solution — JoeHebda • (talk) 12:08, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

3) ω Awaiting a solution — JoeHebda • (talk) 18:12, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

FWIW, i copied User:Brion VIBBER's script locally, and verified it works with "monobook" and "modern" after minor changes. i had to modify about 5 lines to use mw.util.$content instead of $('#content'), and add a line to incease z-index specifically for monobook: for some reason the left edge of the mobile image was overshadowed by the right edge of the content in monobook (i'm sure there's more . you can try User:קיפודנחש/mobile-sidebarcopy.js to verify it indeed works with other skins (you'll probably want to disable the gadget, or you may get 2 of them...). peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:55, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

קיפודנחש – Thanks for helping. I know about testing computer programs in other languages but nothing about js scripts. If you or anther editor could explain the steps to test, I would be willing to try testing. So far, I did un-check existing Gadgets option to disable Mobile sidebar preview option. Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk) 21:36, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

to test the modified script, add to your personal script file the following line (if you copy from edit screen, *do not* include the "code" tags):

importScript('User:קיפודנחש/mobile-sidebarcopy.js');

(if the file does not exist yet, create it, add the line, and save. more detailed instructions and explanations about personal scripts can be found in WP:JS). peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 22:15, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

קיפודנחש – Followed the test instructions & same results = Mobile sidebar preview works only with Vector skin & not the other skins. I did the Purge and logout for each; not seeing the little toolbar icon to activate preview. I know it is running the test version because I have the Gadgets one unchecked with Vector & icon shows & works correctly. — JoeHebda • (talk) 22:37, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

you are correct. it turned out to be more elaborate than i thought - the code Brian wrote displayed the phone nicely, but placing the icon for turning it on/off on the menu turned out to be a bitch... anywhoo, i at least made it so that you can use it now, though it's not really pretty when you use a skin other than vector. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 00:10, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: update: could not get the mobile on/off icon to look acceptable on monobook, modern and cologne blue, so on these skins, the on/off switch is text only (top row for mo*, left-menu under "Edit" for cologne). peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 16:34, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@קיפודנחש: – So far, it looks good and okay to me. For Cologn Blue, I am confused because I can not find any "Edit" anywhere on the page; not on top or left sidebar. I do see a "Mobile view" but that is just for switching the entire page between Mobile/Desktop views. Wondering where to look? — JoeHebda • (talk) 16:48, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: i practically never use cologne, and not aware of all its idiosyncrasies. for me, using this skin, when i am on a page i am allowed to edit, i see in the left-hand menu column "Edit". i verified that this is so even as anon (you can test any skin by appending to the address line "?useskin=<skinname>". this works for anons too. names are [ vector monobook modern cologneblue ]). i also verified that the script causes "Mobile" to appear there even for anons. there might be something in your prefs that causes it not to show, or maybe it *does* show and for some reason you missed it. HTH, peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 17:58, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

קיפודנחש – Yes, I did find it now. I had to set my custom CSS font-size to 155 percent for Cologne Blue skin to help overcome a line-height issue making that skin very hard to read. And the Mobile preview sidebar works okay there as well. Just a FYI, I found a report of User skin preferences at Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences#Skin. Thanks so much for getting Mobile to work correctly with these skins! IMO not seeing the little toolbar icon is a lesser (non-structural) issue.

Now in order to go live with this script, what needs to be done? Once it is out there I will check On in Gadgets. Then, could the Mobile sidebar preview line of Gadgets be moved out of the Testing and development section? Perhaps move into Appearance section? Cheers! — JoeHebda • (talk) 19:13, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: i saw this more as an experiment, to gauge the amount of change needed to make mobile-sidebar work with other skins. ideally, User:Brion VIBBER would patch the script on meta to work with all skins (TBH, Brion needs me to tell him how to do that exactly as much as i need my grandson to teach me to suck eggs). if, for any reason, Brion doesn't do it, enwiki can decide that limiting this gadget to vector is acceptable. the very last resort would be to change the gadget on enwiki to consume Brion's css file from meta, and the modified js file from my userspace (or some copy of it). this last option is both undesirable and unlikely. if none of those options is executed, people who do not use vector can consume my modified script privately, the same way i listed above and you tried. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:31, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@קיפודנחש: – Thanks for the answer. It sounds complicated, but I think I understand. For now, I will leave the test js in place and wait until resolved. Cheers! — JoeHebda • (talk) 13:51, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Template styles

Hey all.

So, since the Jerusalem Hackathon I've been working on a very very longstanding issue we have had with styles. The current WIP solution: template styles.

That new feature allows attaching proper CSS to templates, finally getting rid of limited and troublesome inline styles in elements of the page. The upsides:

• No redundancy: If you use a style on more than an element, simply place them all in the same class and share styles;
• Even less redundancy: if you have a family of templates sharing styles, you can put all the styles in the one "library" template and include that;
• Proper style sheets means support for @media blocks, finally (thus making it possible for styles to work right on mobile, amongst other things);
• Smaller and easier to maintain templates;
• Style sheets becomes available to anyone being able to edit the template, rather than just admins; and
• No more need to edit common.css and have to deal with the crap of caching, or the risk of breaking the site.

The downsides... well, I can't think of any yet but I'm sure we'll find some eventually.  :-)

There is a test wiki in Labs where the current WIP extension is deployed. Feel free to register (not with your real Wikimedia credentials!) and play with it. Beware that this is my testing ground and thus may randomly be unstable. The main page there is a transcluded template with styles if you want a quick and easy example to look at. There is no documentation (yet) but the jist of it is simple: add a ...</templatestyles> element to a template containing a style sheet, and that style will be prepended to any page that transcludes that template (just once, even if the template is transcluded multiple times, including recursively). Not unlike TemplateData, you can actually put the templatestyles element on a subpage - but I expect that would be a bad idea in this case since it affects transclusions and thus should track the template's own protection level.

This pet project of mine has a lot of buy-in and support from the WMF (tracked in phabricator at T483) so once we're happy about how it works I've no doubt it will end up being deployed in production fairly quickly. — Coren ^(talk) 15:05, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Sweeeeet! Hope this gets deployed soon, so we can properly style the Main Page. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:52, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Extreme enthusiasm \m/ =) \m/  fredgandt 16:46, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Best thing EVAH ! Will take us 5 years to get rid of the existing cruft I'm sure, but this will be awesome. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:56, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, this looks very good. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:57, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

FYI, I experimented with this using the Wide image template. {{Wide image}}. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:58, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Wonderful! Sounds like an awesome change. Kudos to you for implementing/coming up with this. APerson (talk!) 02:35, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

I have only one thing to say: Lua Lua Lua.

This would be better if it came with a lua library that would allow adding such styles without a hacky extensiontag:

frame:extensionTag{ name = 'templatestyles', content = 'some text', args = { name = 'foo', group = 'bar' } }

Potentially something like mw.templatestyles or mw.styles or mw.html.styles. This would make the conversion of existing modules much more efficient. 08:28, 21 April 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.89.56 (talk)

That sounds like a nice enhancement I think, but not necessarily a requirement. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

One limitation of the styles in templates is that each page needs to be edited to add them. I think that this is a severe limitation, and would require unnecessarily editing thousands of pages just to add a template to it, even for the smallest tweak. There are possible ways to overcome this. 197.218.81.82 (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I counter that by saying that styling and page structure will no longer accidentally go out of sync. And not every page needs to be edited, just purged, which the queue does already for your template change. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Expanding the use to categories

Instead of adding these to only templates, a more generic tag could be created, e.g. <styles> or <wikistyles> (to avoid possible clashes with HTml) and when they are added them to the Category page they apply to all pages within it. 197.218.81.82 (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. It means that a category would have to purge every single page within it after someone edited the category page. That mixes the models of templates and categories. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

A shadow css for each page

For example, Cat/theme.css or //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme:Cat.css 197.218.81.82 (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

This has been proposed before, but it complicates purging, dependency tracking, parsoid and a host of other things (just like Categories). It has been considered, but was rejected. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Also, something not mentioned here, is if two templates contain contradictory styles which one will win. Another question is how VE will interact with it because it doesn't have a preview so if someone removes a template and adds another with styles it would need to update the styling of the page content in the editor. 197.218.81.82 (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Conflicts are possible indeed, but the effects are at limited to the pages that the templates are transcluded on. I personally am not not afraid of it. If we find people often apply their rules to all divs, we could expand the validator to always require people start their rule with a classname or something like that. Solvable problems I think. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

User stats - last edit

I can use tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-ec/?user= to get the last edit date done by a user but it also dumps a bag of other stuff. Is there a way of giving a tool a list of users and getting just the corresponding last edit date, either a list or one at a time does not matter ? (I am thinking of reinvigorating a project, with a couple of hundred "registered" participants but even the lead coordinator formally retired as a Wikipedian over 12 months ago and the project page has not been updated accordingly and many others seem to have not edited at all anywhere for one or more years, so it would be good to be able to easily see who was still around.) Aoziwe (talk) 13:35, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Give me a list of user names, or point to place, where I can find them. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:06, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Here - Wikipedia:WikiProject Law Enforcement#Participants and here - Wikipedia:WikiProject Law Enforcement/Participants. Thanks in advance. Aoziwe (talk) 12:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like you want my useractivity tool. — Dispenser 14:40, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks I will look at that too. Aoziwe (talk) 12:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Looks good. Thanks. Is it written in python? Any chance of seeing the source ? Aoziwe (talk) 12:32, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

[1], but generally just ask for any specific features. — Dispenser 04:48, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

You might also be interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Astronomical objects (or equivalent for the project you're interested in). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:27, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks I will look at that too. Not quite the exact same thing but will probably be very useful if I get the project going again well. Aoziwe (talk) 12:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Looks very useful too. How does the bot know which page to load the list of users into ? It looks like the opt out page is shared by all projects/user list loads ? Aoziwe (talk) 11:13, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

That's probably a question for User:Harej. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:50, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing and Aoziwe: It compiles the list of active WikiProject participants based on whoever edited the project's page/talk page/subpage twice in the last 90 days. As for subject area, it is based on making five or more edits to a relevant article or its talk page in the last 30 days. "Relevant" is based on the article's talk page being tagged by that WikiProject. Of note, when you opt out, you are removed from all of these WikiProject Directory lists, and don't count toward the total count. Harej (talk) 03:09, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Server switch 2016

➤ To read this in other languages, see m:Tech/Server switch 2016.

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its newest data center in Dallas. This will make sure Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the new data center on Tuesday, 19 April.
On Thursday, 21 April, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be a code freeze for the week of 18 April. No non-essential code deployments will take place.

This test was originally planned to take place on March 22. April 19th and 21st are the new dates. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. They will post any changes on that schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Translation for NZ readers: You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 20 April and Friday, 22 April, starting at 02:00 NZST. Akld guy (talk) 01:20, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Your comment seems more likely to confuse than help readers. Many may not realize NZ refers to New Zealand and NZST is New Zealand Standard Time. There must be relatively few editors in that time zone and most of them are probably aware they are in an unusual time zone for Wikipedia and sometimes need to change the date/day when converting UTC times to New Zealand time. For the large majority of editors it takes place Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April in their local time zone. Your earlier objection to including day of the week in UTC announcements got no support. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:10, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Your comments come across as snarky and argumentative. NZ readers will immediately realize what NZ and NZST refer to. The translation is directed to nobody else, so why comment? Akld guy (talk) 02:36, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Non-NZ readers will not know the post is not directed to them if they don't know what NZ refers to. And NZ readers who are helped by the comment are probably so rare it isn't worth the time everybody else spend reading the comment. Using UTC time is standard in Wikipedia and I hope people don't start posting replies just to convert to other time zones. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:58, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

But they already did. In case you didn't notice, Whatamidoing converted it to BST, CEST, EDT, and PDT. So all I did was convert the time for NZ readers too. Why pick out my post as likely to be misleading? Are readers not also just as likely to misinterpret Whatamidoing's conversions, or is this something personal? Akld guy (talk) 03:27, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Continued on your talk page. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:18, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Barely anyone in that country would even notice what happened. Most people there would have been asleep that time. 49.148.29.21 (talk) 00:46, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

I should have included a link to http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20160419T14 with this message. That provides a translation to any time zone. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I just went to edit a page, and realized that the "Edit" button for VisualEditor is missing. It still gives me the "Edit Source" button, which seems to work fine. Is that related to this whole issue? Because I don't find anything else about it, and the timing seems coincidental. AnnaGoFast (talk) 00:22, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

That's the mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, scroll halfway down to "Editing mode", and pick whichever you want. At a guess, your prefs are probably set to "Always give me the source editor" right now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Not exactly; I checked, and it was set to "Remember last editor", so I changed it to "Show both edit tabs". I don't understand why it changed all of a sudden like that though; it's never done that in the several months I've been around, and I've used both Visual and Source editing during that time. And I'm not sure what "remember last editor" even means, or why it would make the Visual editor disappear. Oh well, fixed now. Thanks for your help. AnnaGoFast (talk) 01:13, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

It's a new feature, for the benefit of editors who only want one Edit tab. Like you, I prefer two, but we are apparently the minority. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Restoring previous protection

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T41038

India national cricket team was indefinitely semiprotected in 2009. I've just now fully protected it because of an edit-war, but once the full protection expires in a few days, the software won't automatically restore the semiprotection. Perhaps a good thing in this specific situation; we can see whether the end of semiprotection will result in more vandalism, or not. Is there any tool that tracks situations in which temporary full protection of an indef-semiprotected page causes all protection to end? Some time ago, I suggested that we have a bot to remind admins to restore semiprotection if they thought it necessary, but I don't think that went anywhere. Nyttend (talk) 13:17, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Assuming the page is on your watchlist, you should get a watchlist entry detailing the protection change - right? If so, and also assuming that you have an epic watchlist, a script could alert you when specific changes occur i.e. use the API to keep tabs on a special user defined list of watched pages such that when they change, you get an almost instant heads up. If anything I just said makes sense, I can add it to my list of things to do. Currently sleepy. fredgandt 18:17, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Previous protection states are not remembered, although they are logged. For articles that exist, there are two actions that can be protected - edit and move; and each of these two can have any one of five protection levels (none, semi, 30/500, template, full) set for it, they don't need to be the same for both. Any protection level (other than "none") can be either indefinite, or be given an expiry time. When that expiry time is reached, the prot level drops right back to "none", regardless of the prot history. So, if an article has indef semi prot for editing, and is then changed to have a fixed-duration full prot (for editing), then when the expiry is reached it doesn't return to semi-protected but becomes unprotected (for editing). I'm sure this has come up at VPT before, if so, there may be a phab: ticket for it. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:02, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: - Would you like a User Script that reminds the user when temporary protections they've added are about to expire? A stop-gap measure, but probably helpful. fredgandt 23:30, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

By "any tool", I was envisioning either a private user script or a more generally used feature (a bot, perhaps?) that lots pages that are about to become unprotected because of a modification in protection state. It would be slightly useful to me (not hugely, because I don't do much with page protection), but I can envision it being lots more significant to folks who hang out at WP:RFPP all the time. Nyttend (talk) 04:03, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I'll put something together, and ping you to try it out when done. I think though you're right, that blanket usefulness for all would need to be built in to the core or bot driven. Aren't there already bot(s) clearing up protection tags after expiration? If my memory serves me correctly this time, that/those bot(s) could be tasked quite trivially to do the messaging as they go. fredgandt 09:01, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal: - could MusikBot do this? fredgandt 09:11, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

@Fred Gandt: There are at least four such bots (including Cyberbot II (talk · contribs), DumbBOT (talk · contribs), Lowercase sigmabot (talk · contribs) and MusikBot (talk · contribs), possibly others), although none of them are comprehensive, and some have periods of outage.

I also forgot to mention Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 136#Page protection - reverting to previous protection when a higher form expires and phab:T41038. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:47, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Interesting Redrose64, thanks. I may join in that phab; it looks like they're over thinking it. fredgandt 12:08, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I could definitely have MusikBot check if full protection had been lifted, and if so, restore any previous semi protection with the original expiry. However this obviously requires the admin bit, and especially something powerful like page protection probably isn't going to be well-received by the community. We'd need broad consensus for this, but if you can achieve it, I'm happy to do the coding. As for comprehensiveness, MusikBot goes off of Category:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates. So it's true that if someone else, or another bot, removes the protection template first, then MusikBot will have no notion of it and won't know to restore semi. I guess I'd need to write a new task altogether to go off of the logs rather than the category. That's how Lowercase sigmabot (talk · contribs) worked, I believe. Anyway I'd be willing to do that extra work too, provided we have the community backing the effort — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:51, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

This sounds like something people would grow to depend on, so I think it would be better relegated to an extension or to core (I think the best way would be to allow multiple protection entries on the same page at a time, admins could edit on, or add an additional one - that way they can have independent expiration). Then a bot could be used to provide a report of parameters that aren't provided for in the core; such as applying multiple indefinite protections, or an indefinite greater protection over a lower definite one. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:36, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

xaosflux - although that sounds like the technically prefered method (stacking rather than replacing), the issue of which has a higher level is brought up on the phab Redrose linked. There's a problem deciding which of the current and potentially future levels is actually higher than which others. For the highest level to take precedence over any others present, that issue would need to be resolved first.

As I said though, I think that's (without great change) over thinking it, and as MusikAnimal suggests, simply replacing any immediately preceding prots that were due to still be in effect when a prot is lifted is relatively trivial - just a case of parsing some dates. The admin bit would be needed for reinstantiation of prots, but messaging (akin to what AnomieBOT does for edit requests, or more directly on admin talk pages) wouldn't require any additional privileges, and surely wouldn't be considered controversial? fredgandt 16:56, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Sure, messaging the protecting admin is a good start and indeed would attract little opposition. I can tag that on to the current and stable implementation of going off of the maintenance category. At a later time we can look into going off of the logs when we see the idea gains more traction. If we could get the OK from several admins regularly working in this area, I think that'd satisfy the necessary consensus. What do you think Xaosflux? I can also add an "opt-out" page, in the event the admin wishes not to be contacted in this way — MusikAnimal ^talk 17:17, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I think we should workshop out the use cases especially for "lowering" actions - for example if I come a cross a page that is full protected with a year left on it, and and reduce it semi for 6 months - when that expired I wouldn't want some bot adding a 6 month full protection afterwords. Also, bots break - so anyone temporarily changing a protection would still need to check up on their actions. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:45, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I think there are two distinct cases of prot change that can be discerned and handled uniquely. In one case, a prot may be replaced by another, whilst in another the prot may be removed and in its place another be placed. From the bot's perspective, the first case would be an instance worthy of note, but second could be ignored, and the difference wouldn't be in the expirations, it'd be in the actions. As long as admin got into the habit of always removing prots before adding the new one if the old one shouldn't be reengaged after the new one expires, shouldn't that cover it?

Human attention should never be underestimated

I suggest that (should this go ahead) the bot maintains a page chronologically listing the recently expired (where the action prior to the one that just expired was the addition of a prot) through to soon due to expire and on to due to expire in the next couple of days, so that all the admin can keep an eye on it. I think that would be most efficient - to share the load, rather than individual targeted messaging. fredgandt 23:05, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

(←) My thoughts were to handle the single use-case of reminding admins that the full protection they added has expired, and that the previous semi or 30/500 period would otherwise still be in place. Any other scenario seems counterintuitive to me. The bot would provide the type and datestamp of the previous protection, and a link to protect the page with those settings. Whether or not the admin wants to do anything about it is up to them. This certainly would be helpful for me, as I fully-protect pages often due to edit wars, and days will go by before I remember to check or someone reports to RFPP about the ongoing anon disruption — MusikAnimal ^talk 02:15, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Earth to JDForrester

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 145#Do you want one Edit tab, or two? It's your choice, and especially the subsection "VE was imposed as primary editor", have been archived. User:Alsee was told off last week because he wasn't patient enough and User:Jdforrester (WMF) had no time then to address this, but his interpretation that nothing would be forthcoming the week after that comment (the 14th) was completely misguided.

Sure enough, it's the 21st, and the product manager, who promised before the implementation that VE would not be the primary editor on enwiki, has still not responded anywhere about this. He has edited a lot of other things, and must have seen the messages on his talk page, but apparently acknowledging that something seems to have gone wrong and that you will look into it (preferably with some timeline) is too hard. Easier to just let it archive and forget about it. If only we had some people at the WMF who could drop you a note at your talk page there, some WMF-community intermediaries or something similar. Oh well, we can always dream... Fram (talk) 12:12, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

I left a post for the Executive Director noting that we were assured that this was not going to happen, and that we have been unable to get any response on it. Alsee (talk) 01:51, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Weren't you told off at some phabricator ticket for saying that Jdforrester wasn't going to respond last week, when they were certain that that would happen and that the lack of communication was only for the week of the 13th? It's the only fast reaction we have had in all this, and it was of course incorrect... It has been archived here once, at least thanks to Flow it can't get archived at his talk page. We have a new deployment this thursday, I presume, if it isn't fixed by then it is just another giant FY against enwiki and another lie by the same people at the WMF. But we need to respect them and work together instead of against each other, of course. Still waiting for that to happen from there to here... Fram (talk) 14:51, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

@Elitre (WMF):, can you ask Jdforrester when he plans to reply to these concerns, and when he plans to actually do something about them? If he has done either meanwhile, great, last time I looked a could find a lot of activity but nothing about this, despite posts on his talk page. If we need to contact him at another (public) location, feel free to post a link to whatever page is best to reach him. It has been two weeks now... Fram (talk) 10:18, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

He has already replied at one of the countless venues where related questions were posted ;) Best, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:41, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Apparently he doesn't even check his talk page, weird... Fram (talk) 06:40, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Drumpfinator extension for chrome and unintentional vandalism

Not sure if this should go here. It's not a technical problem--a heads up really. John Oliver popularized a chrome extensions which changes Trump to Drumpf if viewed on a website. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/drumpfinator/hcimhbfpiofdihhdnofbdlhjcmjopilp?hl=en I made the mistake of having this on while I asked a question on the main help desk page. Evidently when I clicked "edit source" Drumpf was brought in rather than Trump because that was what my browser was displaying at the time. Oops. I have since removed the extension. — Preceding unsigned comment added by AugusteBlanqui (talk • contribs) 09:56, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

I've come across this, and there has been an ANI thread about it. The scary thing is that Trump is changed to Drumpf on the entire page you're innocently editing. The whole of ANI, for instance. Bishonen | talk 20:16, 22 April 2016 (UTC).

Haha, I once accidentally did the same thing myself! --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 20:48, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Twinkle error at CFD

Any idea why Twinkle is giving me a "failed to find target" when I attempt to make a CFD entry? I haven't seen one of those errors in ages. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 20:50, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

@TenPoundHammer: I've removed a space from the end of Twinkle's hidden comment at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy. See if that helps. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:25, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Article title with unusual character?

There appears to be an unusual character in the title of the article Εrina language (which is currently up for speedy deletion). Compare that page to the already-deleted Erina language. I'm guessing that the article creator put a character into the former article title that looks like a letter of the English alphabet, but isn't. Yet I can't figure out what character is different. Even zooming in to 200%, I can't see the difference. Can anyone advise as to what the different character is, and whether there is a good way to identify such characters? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 00:33, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

%CE%95rina_language vs. Erina_language can be established using {{urlencode:string|WIKI}}. See mw:Help:Magic words#URL data for more info. fredgandt 00:39, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142#2 articles with the same name ?. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:34, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

See also Εrinα_language — xaosflux ^Talk 03:41, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The easiest way to find such characters:

Copy the article page's web address (URL) from your browser's address bar and paste it back into the address bar (or to a text editor or other text area). At least with Firefox and Google Chrome (with Safari on my old Mac, you have to drag the favicon instead, which is equally easy), the copied text will have "unusual" characters represented as sequences of two to four percent-encoded bytes, such as %CE%95, which are easy to spot.

You can usually find out more about a strange character by copying the character itself and pasting it into the Wikipedia search field: Here's the redirect page for the character Ε. --Pipetricker (talk) 17:56, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Erina language. We have a persistent disrupter on our hands. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:11, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks for the suggestions. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:18, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Deletion timeout on File:To Commons.svg

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T133525

I just tried to delete the local copy of File:To Commons.svg per Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files/2016 March 8#File:To Commons.svg but got a "Database error: To avoid creating high replication lag, this transaction was aborted because the write duration (27.841500759125) exceeded the 6 seconds limit. If you are changing many items at once, try doing multiple smaller operations instead.", presumably due to the number of usages this file has. Just to confirm, should I be bugging the sysadmins about this? MER-C 07:08, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

• Possibly, but try again first before you do. That's happened to me once in the past and it worked properly the second time. BethNaught (talk) 07:17, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Nope, no luck. I'll file the Phabricator ticket. Thanks anyway. MER-C 10:36, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
    • Curious to see what would happen, I restored all deleted revisions (I'd deleted it under F2 a few years ago) and then deleted everything. All went ideally. I then selected all revisions that weren't deleted before today, told it to undelete them, and after virtually no wait time, I was given a message in red text:

      Errors were encountered while undeleting the file: The file "mwstore://local-multiwrite/local-deleted/k/6/2/k62p57azqte5g5k7yr19mduow3kzak2.svg" is in an inconsistent state within the internal storage backends
      
      The file "mwstore://local-multiwrite/local-public/7/78/To_Commons.svg" is in an inconsistent state within the internal storage backends

      Never seen this before. Any idea what happened? Presumably it's related to the first problem, but I don't understand it at all. Nyttend (talk) 18:43, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
      • For some reason, the file File:To Commons.svg was broken earlier today when I checked the file information page. Most pages currently use File:To Commons TEMP.svg because of recent edits to {{Copy to Wikimedia Commons}}. MER-C changed the file name at one place in the template, and then I changed the file name at another place in the template when I saw that the image was broken on file information pages. The normal file name File:To Commons.svg seems to work again, so unless there are other things to do first, the file name change should be reverted in the template. --Stefan2 (talk) 19:27, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

  It's some kind of server side issue that has tripped up a number of file deletions recently. Not the same issue as the one MER-C was having but it's been reported in Phabricator.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:49, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

  Local version deleted and template hack reverted. Thanks everyone. MER-C 12:14, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Ping fails on some names

Check out the posts here. Note that the ping is redlined. Why? That does seem to be the user's name. I have noticed this before, is it due to the space? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:29, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

It's because the user has not created a user page. Click the link, it will tell you that the page does not exist. --Elektrik Fanne 13:31, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The notification should work regardless of whether or not the user page exists, though. SiBr₄ (talk) 13:36, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The notification did indeed work. --Elektrik Fanne 13:51, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

It appears I am being wikihounded by a faux new user. Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:59, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

You ask a question here and then complain when it gets answered? 85.255.232.121 (talk) 14:45, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Not getting email-confirmation emails

Sometime in the past year or so, all my Wikimedia accounts, including en:WP, have been flagged to request email confirmation, despite having long ago done this. I've tried a number of times to re-send the email confirmation code (on several sites), but I've not received any. They're supposed to be going to an email I've had since before WP existed, and at which I receive 30-60 messages a day. (I also check every single email tagged as spam). The "Confirm email address" page doesn't say what to do if one never gets any messages. Who should I talk to about getting this fixed? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:43, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Yahoo ? There's been known to be some trouble with that email provider. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:19, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

If not Yahoo, perhaps related to phab:T130367 (both reports are using gmail). I just tested a gmail address and it worked ok, so that's not the central issue. Have you checked the Trash folder, in case there's a filter that's mis-filing things before they even hit the Spam folder? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Upload Wizard

Hi,

I've been using the File Upload Wizard to upload files to Wikipedia, but it only allows me to upload files one by one, whereas the Upload Wizard on Commons allows me to set the information for multiple files and then upload them all without having to reload the page. The Commons wizard is thus much easier to use; is there any way that could be replicated here on WP? --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 20:41, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-17

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

Problems

• Wikimedia tested a new data center last week. This meant that the wikis could be read but not edited for 45 minutes on April 19 and for 20 minutes on April 21. [2]
• When the data center was tested, new edits were not shown in the recent changes log for 20 minutes. They are in the logs now. You can read more about how to find the edits.
• Unread notifications were sometimes counted incorrectly. This has now been fixed. [3]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia Commons will have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Commons. This will happen on April 26. [4]
• It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [5]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 27. It will be on all wikis from April 28 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on April 26 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The "Save page" button when you edit will be called "Publish" instead. This is to help new editors understand what it does. It already works like this on some wikis. [6]

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

21:02, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Change of "Save page" button to "Publish"

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T131132

The use of Publish instead of Save Page would look more confusing IMO as many experienced users are already used to saving pages. Publishing would mean it's final, and Wikipedia itself is not final. Was there community consensus or Meta discussion on that change? And will this go live together with the new MediaWiki version? 49.148.95.70 (talk) 04:05, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Some documentation would need to be changed … --Pipetricker (talk) 09:03, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

"as many experienced users".. Please note that these people are far fewer than that globally there are (potential, incidental or inexperienced) users of the MediaWiki software. Just saying. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:54, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

And every save is final, because every action is public and logged eternally. It's a matter of perspective. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:58, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Comment on the phab tickets - I can't see any good reason this shouldn't be able to be controlled via a local variable such as Mediawiki:Save-button-label. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:10, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Is it like a localization to Wikipedia? 49.148.95.70 (talk) 11:17, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

It's currently controlled via MediaWiki:Savearticle but will apparently change to MediaWiki:Publishpage.[7] The wording is also being changed in the VisualEditor interface, in other wikis, and presumably in many foreign languages when they catch up. The transition may cause some confusion but there will probably be more long-term confusion if the English Wikipedia decides to override a coming "Publish page" default. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:33, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The current save button uses MediaWiki:Savearticle. Use &uselang=qqx to find it out once its deployed. Also, blah en-gb blah blah always broken. — Dispenser 11:46, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I missed on that one. Was there a discussion in this Wikipedia about the change? The discussion in the link is to Phabricator, not necessarily about Wikipedia, and many users may haven't been aware until the bot message was posted here. 49.148.95.70 (talk) 11:17, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• I think this is very unwise. "Publish" is not a good word and is confusing (especially for non-native English speakers who come here). "Save" (or "Post") is simple, direct, common, and easily understood. "Publish" is entirely inaccurate. How did the word "publish" get so corrupted that someone wants to use it for single impermanent iteration of a Wikipedia page that could get reverted by someone else within seconds? Softlavender (talk) 13:35, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Actually, they've been talking about this for years, and multiple studies with users say that this change needs to be made. Inexperienced people consistently believe that "Save" means "Save inside my personal account, but don't show it on the web". And because of a lifetime of being told to "save early, save often", they often save before trying to do something that feels risky to them – like "Show preview". I'm looking forward to this change, because it looks like there will be less confusion for new editors and consequently less mess for the rest of us to clean up. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

table

What is the value to make a table length freeform? It will be the entire length of the page section available. Does this make sense? Moscowamerican (talk) 04:49, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@Moscowamerican: If I understand question correctly, then answer is - it's by default. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:21, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

A table's logical dimensions are governed by the presence or absence of a caption, the number of rows and the number of cells per row; the HTML specs do not set a maximum for either of the latter two, but there is a maximum of one caption. The amount of content in each cell does not affect the logical dimensions.

A table's physical dimensions (measurements in pixels) depend upon many factors, and are not consistent between browsers even when installed on the same computer. It is not a good idea to design a table for a particular width or height, since something as trivial as the fonts that are installed on the viewing user's computer can significantly alter the size of the text, and thus the amount of space occupied by that text, and hence the table dimensions. What looks good on your computer might not look good on mine, and certainly won't look the same on everybody else's. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:41, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh. okay thank you (talk) (talk Moscowamerican (talk) 09:04, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Appearance: How to indicate a link is a redirect?

Polish Wikipedia by default colors all redirects green, just like on all Wikipedias links that were clicked previously have a darker shade, and red links are, well, red. I cannot find an option to trigger green coloring of redirects in preferences/gadgets. Anyone knows where it is hidden, or where can I find a related script? If you reply here, please WP:ECHO me. Thanks! --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:11, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@Piotrus: put this piece here or if you want this globally (in all WMF projects), then here:

a.mw-redirect {color: green !important;}

--Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:19, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

I find it really irritating to have all redirect links decorated differently because there are so many and most aren't a problem. I therefore have them only showing up on edit preview:

.action-submit .mw-redirect {text-decoration: underline wavy green;}

I also colour all disambiguation links with different underlines all the time, as they almost always need fixing. Relentlessly (talk) 07:22, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@Piotrus: There’s also User:Anomie/linkclassifier which recolours links to redirects, dab pages and many other things.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 07:32, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you guys, the script pointed out by User:Edgars2007 does what I want perfectly. Anomie's script looks more powerful, but can anyone comment on whether it has issues like delays page loading (ping back User:JohnBlackburne)? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:37, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Not noticeably no, it seems quite lightweight (and I do notice these things). Your experience may be different but it’s easy enough to install and try out.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 07:40, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

List instances of template

Is there a way to find all pages where a specific template is directly invoked (short of searching a database dump)? That is, places where {{example}} exists, but not pages where a template that transcludes Template:example, for example {{Transcludes example}}, is included. I'm guessing not, but it's worth a try. —  crh ₂₃  (Talk) 20:18, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@Crh23: try searching: insource:/\{\{example/i. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:31, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, I think that largely solves it. Are there server loading problems with running complex insource:/ searches? —  crh ₂₃  (Talk) 20:51, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

When a query takes to long to execute, you will get truncated results. But this is relatively simple and unique enough. (complex and common would be problematic). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:09, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

More specifically - insource:/[^{][{]{2}[Ee]xample[}]{2}[^}]/ fredgandt 20:43, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Out of interest, is there an advantage to using /[Ee]xample/ over /example/i or /[{]{2}/ over /\{\{/? —  crh ₂₃  (Talk) 20:51, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Since template names are case sensitive, searching insensitively (the i denotes this) is inadvisable. The rest of the changes I suggested filter out {{{example}}} and {{examples are awesome}} etc. Specifying /[^{][{]{2}[Ee]xample[}]{2}[^}]/ is specifying:

• "E" or "e" followed by "xample" where that word is preceded by two opening braces not preceded by any opening braces and followed by two closing braces not followed by any closing braces.

The end result being only the exact results you want. What it doesn't do is account for the possible use of <nowiki>...</nowiki> or <pre>...</pre> or the like, which would be an epic regex since the tags might not be immediately wrapping the template markup.  fredgandt 23:33, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Of course (I thought as falling asleep last night) there are a few cases where the template may be used in other templates that would result in preceding and/or following braces. fredgandt 10:51, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I just tried making it more specific and account for whitespace and the possibility of arguments that I completely forgot to account for before (derp), but the server(s) rejected it. It did however occur to me that the easiest and most effective way to find them (whatever they are) is to add a hidden tracking category to the template you're hunting. fredgandt 19:42, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Removal of conversion templates from infobox that converts anyway?

This straddles technical and policy issues, so I'll keep it short. Are edits such as this one desirable since the template it's used in appears to automatically convert the measurements into the desired form anyway? (Related to my comments in this thread). Ubcule (talk) 20:35, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Template:Convert is called twice, (they all use convert), and that does not seem efficient. But don't worry about performance. Stylistically there could be made an issue concerning the "proper number of significant digits" to display (the previous version having three significant digits in the height), and another issue to debate could just be the "cleanliness" of having a straight input with no template. But the source sometimes mandates the template input (WP:Verifiability, and thus conversion (WP:Reliability), per MOS:CONVERSIONS. — CpiralCpiral 22:21, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@Cpiral: Thanks for the response; I'm still not 100% sure if I was in the right or not- I think your intended answer is that this doesn't really matter anyway?..!

(FWIW, the reason I initially made the edits wasn't for performance or style reasons, but because someone had changed it from the template style to the plain style- without making clear the reasoning or the fact that the parent template still did the conversion anyway. If I'd known that, I might have had second thoughts in the first place).

Ubcule (talk) 18:12, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Possibly unfree file templates

I've just tagged a couple of files as possibly unfree at Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files/2016 April 26 but the templates aren't working on that page and the uploaders' talk pages. The file page template does however show up. I copied and pasted the template from the file page onto the talk pages. Cloudbound (talk) 21:50, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

• PUF has been closed. Please make your nominations at FFD. BethNaught (talk) 21:52, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

• I've added a {{deprecated template}} as this was not mentioned in the template or its documentation. Peter James (talk) 00:38, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

BethNaught and Peter James, thanks for your responses. Cloudbound (talk) 17:19, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Is it possible to fix my account create date?

Hi, I'm trying to figure out why my account has the wrong start date (it is probably connected to the switchover from UseModWiki to MediaWiki in 2002). This report says I started Jan 26, 2002. However my edit summary gives my first edit as September 24, 2001. Is there anyway this could be fixed? Manning (talk) 01:10, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Not from here, no. You would need to ask somebody with sysadmin rights - and they might refuse. The place to make such requests is phab:. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:03, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Sweet thanks. Manning (talk) 04:39, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Watchlist: pages that have changed

Follow-up to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Watchlist: pages that have changed

To indicate a change since last visit in items on a watchist, the tiny green dots (bullets) are not as immediately distinguishable from the tiny blue dots as would be yellow or amber dots. Would it not be better to use yellow or amber dots?

I think the previous discussion concentrated on the shape, not the colour, and so I make bold to raise the question again. Theodoxa (talk) 11:18, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Color was discussed as well. Other colors did not fit the scheme of the interface, while green ususally indicates change. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 13:47, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

My edit is not mentioned in the article history

Not sure whether to treat this for a bug - it is a minor inconvenience anyway. Still I thought I'd mention it as there could be room for improvement. I performed a minor edit to the article Aeroprakt A-32 Vixxen, changing "sped" to "speed" and "woulded" to "moulded". Thse modifications are reflected in the article - and that's what counts! - but are not visible in the article history. Neither does the edit show in the list of my "contributions". Mentioned for what it is worth... Thanks for taking care. Jan olieslagers (talk) 12:54, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Editor Ahunt made those edits in these changes. If you were trying to do the same thing at the same time and he saved first, your duplicate edits are ignored by the system. --David Biddulph (talk) 12:59, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The changes were made by somebody else.[8] This is probably what happened: You clicked edit before the changes so you saw the old version in the edit box, but you saved after the other editor had already saved the same changes. That meant your edit made no change and became a null edit. Users are not informed of this but just see the previously saved article and assume they did it themselves. Null edits are not registered anywhere. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:02, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Pffieuw! Talking of a quick reaction! A clear explanation, too. If anything, it teaches me to type faster :) Many thanks! Jan olieslagers (talk) 13:04, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Some API + javascript help needed

I want to add a link into toolbox portlet to Google with query text: "German Wikipedia's pagename". So I need make an API call to get dewiki pagename. Code, what I have come up with:

$(function () {
	var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
	req.open("GET", mw.config.get('wgScriptPath') + "/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=langlinks&redirects=1&lllang=de&titles="+encodeURIComponent(title), false);
	req.send(null);
	var response = eval('(' + req.responseText + ')');

 mw.util.addPortletLink(
  "p-tb",
  "https://www.google.com/search?q=" + response,
  "google"
)});

I'm 100% sure, that above is completely wrong, at least the API part (but the query itself should be OK). So maybe somebody could translate that piece into working code. Would be nice, that

• the link doesn't show up, if there isn't dewiki article
• variable "response" should get PAGENAMEBASEd (remove parenthesis, if there are such). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:14, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

// Guarantee that our dependencies are loaded
mw.loader.using( [ 'mediawiki.api', 'mediawiki.util' ], function() {
  var api = new mw.Api( {
    ajax: {
        // Use a user agent, so that sysadmins can find you and tell you to fix your tool
        headers: { 'Api-User-Agent': 'MyAPITool/1.0' }
    } } );

    api.get( {
      // Use the new output structure of the api
      formatversion: 2,
      prop: 'langlinks',   
      lllang: 'de',
      titles: mw.config.get( 'wgPageName' ),
      redirects: true
    } ).done( function( data ) {
      if ( !data.query.pages[0].langlinks.length ) {
         // no german langlink for this page
         return;
      }
      var title = data.query.pages[0].langlinks[0].title;
      // Strip parenthesis
      title = title.replace( /\s\(.*\)/, '' );

      // Add when page is ready  
      $( function() {
        mw.util.addPortletLink(
          'p-tb',
          'https://www.google.com/search?q=' + encodeURIComponent( title ),
          'google'
        );
      } );

    } ); // add .fail promise if you want to handle errors
} );

Something like this should do it... I didn't test it, but it should show the general direction. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:52, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I wrote a script that does something like this a long time ago. User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/googleTitle.js. Basically, if I'm just trying to get the name of the page I'm on, I wouldn't bother with the API call-- just use the wgPageName variable (mw.config.get("wgPageName") is the right syntax these days, I think) and remove the parens/urlencode/whatever on my own. EDIT: Oh, crap, didn't realize you're looking for dewiki's article from enwiki. Well, nevermind, I'll just leave this for the record of my poor reading comprehension. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 16:55, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, TheDJ! It works. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:14, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

mobile view, interwiki and categories

I noticed something that puzzled me, and am curious to know if it's known, is it intentional, and what the community thinks:

I have an android device, with 2 browsers: an inbuilt one (not even sure how it's called: android shows it as "internet"), and google chrome. With the inbuilt one and with Brion's hack ("Mobile sidebar preview" in preferences => gadgets), I have 2 buttons under each article: "Talk" and "Read in other languages" (assuming article has interwiki), and no link to categories. with chrome on android, I have "Talk" and "Categories", but no interwiki. This happens regardless if I'm logged in or not. Can anyone corroborate? Is it something only I can see? And if others see the same thing, is this intentional? should I report a bug? (I noticed some other small discrepancies, e.g., some pages on some browsers show a folding "toc", while other pages/browsers don't). peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 19:53, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Can a template detect if it is called with an uncapitalized (lowercase) initial letter?

Is there any way a template can detect if it is called with an uncapitalized initial letter? E.g., could the (say) {{H}} template distinguish between being called as {{H}} and {{h}}? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:15, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

No; this isn't limited to templates either, this is a mediawiki built-in on Wikipedia (but not Wiktionary). Any page is case-insensitive in its first letter. MediaWiki sees Main page as exactly equivalent to main page. Intelligentsium 23:18, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure a template invoking some specific Lua could, but am a learner and deathly tired so can't currently say exactly how. fredgandt 02:14, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

The question comes down to where the case-flattening is done. E.g., a template {{mw}} exists, showing that the namespace tolerates uncapitalized names. And when a template (like articles) is reached via a redirect, the name actually called is displayed, so some kind of information about the called name comes through.

Of course, if there is some way of distinguishing this, and some idiot applied that some where, then every thing we have told everyone about the first letter being case-insensitive would be wrong, and hell would break loose. So maybe I don't want to know? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 18:26, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

{{mw}} only displays lower case at top of the page because it transcludes {{lowercase title}} from {{Mw/doc}}. The real pagename is Template:Mw. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:42, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Also, Template:Mw and template:mw are exactly the same page - no redirection is performed. Try going to wp:vPT, which is a redirect - you'll see that it says at the top "(Redirected from Wikipedia:VPT) - the capitalisation was already adjusted before the redirect was acted upon. It might be possible (and I promise nothing here) for Lua code to be able to detect if a template (or other page) was reached via a redirect, but Lua cannot tell if capitalisation was altered in the ways I've just demonstrated. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:05, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I see. (I did forget about the transclusion.) Thank you all. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:22, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

It's possible for Lua modules to see what template they were called from by using frame:getParent():getTitle(), but there's no way at the moment to tell whether that template was accessed via a redirect or not. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:00, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

@J. Johnson: - why do you ask? fredgandt 21:22, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

I was curious. I stumbled across {{mw}}, and got to wondering. And it did occur to me that there might be a use for such a property in a narrow set specialized templates. But they're fairly dubious, so I am glad this property does not exist. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:33, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Well as I said, Lua can read (and parse, and execute, and expand ...) the page content, so can (with effort) determine if the markup has an initial capital or not, but with no good reason to do it - meh.

A template could more easily correct itself by substituting a call to it with markup that's guaranteed to be one way or the other (if that was ever a concern). i.e. {{example|foo=bar}} could be automatically replaced with {{Example|foo=bar}}. Note: If either were called to be substituted, the case of the first letter wouldn't matter. fredgandt 22:22, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Search Contribs AFTER a Specific Date

Currently Wikipedia allows users to search contribs made before a specific month/year. However, when dealing with IP vandalism who hop around, it would be exceedingly useful to be able to search contribs made after a specific month/year (especially when combined with wildcard and range searches). Is this currently possible? If not, how do I go about suggesting it? Please ping me in reply. Thank you! EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 06:55, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, go to their contribs page, click the "older 50" link, and then the "newer 50" link. Notice that the URL's query string now contains something like &dir=prev&offset=20160427095616 (among other things). Here, the dir=prev means "start at the specified date/time and go forwards in time from that point", and offset=20160427095616 is the start point, formatted CCYYMMDDhhmmss, so this works out as 09:56:16, 27 April 2016. You can set your own start point by adjusting that to a different date and time, so to give all contributions made at or after 12:00, 1 April 2016 (UTC) you would use &dir=prev&offset=20160401120000. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:38, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

As a matter of interest, with a certain gadget enabled (see the note below), it is possible to view the contributions of a range of IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, in the last N months. For IPv4, you would need to enter a range, say /24, but for IPv6 a single IP defaults to showing /64. Two examples follow. The first defaults to showing edits in the last month, while the second specifies edits in the last three months.

• {{blockcalc|142.105.159.0/24}}
• {{blockcalc|months=3|2601:188:0:ABE6:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63}}

Total affected	Affected addresses	Given addresses	Range	Contribs
256	256	256	142.105.159.0/24	contribs

Total affected	Affected addresses	Given addresses	Range	Contribs
1 /64	1 /64	1	2601:188:0:abe6::/64	contribs

Johnuniq (talk) 12:01, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

@Johnuniq and Redrose64: Thank you both. I'll make sure I have that gadget enabled (I think I do) and that trick with the url query will work. It would be nice if we could get a less cumbersome way of doing it (like the dropdown menus for seeing edits before a certain date. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 19:14, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Watchlist getting stuck

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T134067

For quite a while now, ever since the last big update, when I try to bring up my Watchlist it takes ages - much MUCH longer than bringing up Contributions or getting to the Main Page. But this afternoon I have been unable to even get to my Watchlist. Sorry if I missed the memo (lol) but does anyone know what is going on? Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 21:11, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

• I'm having this problem too, Safari 6.1.6 (yes, I know, haven't updated). I managed to log on using Chrome, deleted my watchlist, then tried logging in with Safari and had no problem. I started reloading the watchlist a bit at a time, and after adding all the As, which was okay, then the Bs and then I got a message telling me there are too many pages to load (the entire watchlist - all of it – is barely over 2000, so As and Bs is a small number). Have we stopped supporting old versions of Safari? Victoria (tk) 01:21, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
• Adding: I tried to go to my contribs to comment out the scripts I have on my .js and other pages and hung when I clicked "contribs" so I think it's more than the watchlist. Victoria (tk) 01:28, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Nice to know I'm not the only one. Haven't tried Chrome, am running on Safari atm, but haven't been able to access my Watchlist at all today. Is anyone else having this issue? Shearonink (talk) 03:09, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I can't see my contributions page either. Richard75 (talk) 08:59, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

"Have we stopped supporting old versions of Safari?". Officially not yet, but that is probably because no one thought about taking that action yet. It is really hard to support older versions of Safari, because it is a tiny group of the userbase, and because it is very difficult for developers to run older versions of Mac OS Safari (basically you need a 2nd mac that you don't upgrade). I would say that Safari 8 and up is what is effectively supported. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:08, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. But upgrading sounds like a hassle, especially since I don't have any trouble on any other website; I think I'll just stop editing. Richard75 (talk) 09:12, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

You can consider using a different browser. Also, reports like this, will probably cause older Safari versions to be degraded from our list of 'Modern' to 'Basic' support, where all Javascript enhancements (the most likely cause of any problems) are no longer enabled for you. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:17, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. The problem might not be with the browser, though, and I'm not sure how to respond to the "the reports like this … " part of this. I managed to load 500 pages back to the my watchlist and it worked, then it hung again when I loaded the next 100. So basically, just reporting that when I try to log in, when I try to view my watchlist, (and last night trying to view diffs, page history, and contribs) it hung. So there's an issue somewhere. Victoria (tk) 12:16, 29 April 2016 (UTC) Struck old - these conditions no longer apply. Victoria (tk) 21:37, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

• Since yesterday I've gone from being unable to view the watchlist, contribs, page histories, spent many hours trying to troubleshoot, and now get a complete freeze trying to log in. I think that it would nice if the three people posting to this thread who are experiencing similar difficulties could have a little more troubleshooting help other than being told that the browser isn't supported, please update. I get update messages from other websites and usually I have months to do the updating. Here it has to be done after the fact. And in the meantime you're locked out. Victoria (tk) 21:37, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Here's what I found out: My guess is you are using Lion or Mountain Lion as your operating system, and this means you are unable to upgrade to a more recent version of Safari. Safari 6.1.6 came out in August 13, 2014. It's not realistic for us to have to maintain compatibility with outdated browsers indefinitely. It looks like you have two options at this point: Switch to Chrome, or upgrade your browser to El Capitan so that you can upgrade to the most recent version of Safari. I use Chrome almost exclusively, as I find it is the best browser for the type of work I do here on Wikipedia (operating system is Mavericks). I suggest you give it a try, as this is a simple fix. — Diannaa (talk) 14:09, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
    • Hi Diannaa, thanks for replying. You're right, I need to update to El Capitan, but don't have the time to do it immediately (and it wasn't on my list of things to do during the winter), and I think that's my frustration that this came out of nowhere. The issues are to do with loading any page and it doesn't matter if I'm logged out or not, i.e. if I'm reading an article while logged out and click a wikilink it freezes (and it's a really terrible freeze). Surely I'm not the only person who is lazy about updating. I understand that we can't support all browsers or older browsers; I do get that. But it seems a disservice, is the point I'm trying to make, and I don't have trouble reading or accessing any other websites. When that begins to happen, I know that it's time to update, but I'm surprised that it's Wikipedia that's forcing it, is all. In the meantime, I dumped my entire watchlist, which allowed me to log in and I was able got here using the search function. Victoria (tk) 16:38, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
      • The problem is very simple. We need to find someone with enough technical skill who can 'figure' out why this is occurring. Now those people generally tend not to run Safari 6 on Lion, can't easily downgrade to that, and can't easily install it from scratch. Simple problem, hard solution. It's not a disservice, it's a practicality. In the mean time, I've filed a bugreport (which anyone could have done), but Victoria, could you please check if you have the same problems on other language versions of Wikipedia or sister sites ? Just to make sure that it is not a problem specific to this site ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:37, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
        • Hi TheDJ, that's a good point. While logged out I went the main page and clicked today's featured article, clicked through the first link, tried to click that page's history and froze. Also, while logged out, I went from the TFA to the German version, was able to click through a few links, and was able to open the page history without freezing. I can log into Commons and load my watchlist there. I was also able to click history on a file without freezing. So it seems to be an issue with en.wp. Basically if I click anything that's blue here, whether or not I'm logged in, it freezes and I have a very hard time getting out of the freeze. My concern is not so much whether I can edit, because I haven't been much recently, but whether it's feasible to add some sort of notification to anyone using Lion/Safari 6.xx that Wikipedia doesn't support the browser, instead of causing an ugly freeze. P.s trying to preview causes in edit conflict, so apologies for mistakes. Also, thanks for filing the bug report. Victoria (tk) 18:20, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
        • Hm, that is strange. Do you have any Gadgets enabled in your preferences per chance ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:53, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
          • TheDJ, yes, I have gadgets and I can turn them all off and then work through to test each one, but until I'm able to put back my watchlist I won't be working under normal conditions. Before posting here, while still logged out, I tried to get click the history tab of the TFA on the main page and froze again, so it seems the issue is more to do with the OS/browser rather than whether logged in user or not. My sense is that during the server updates something got changed with the way pages are called and it's now not compatible with Lion/Safari 6.xx Victoria (tk) 21:15, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
            • Victoriaearle Right, after the earlier reply, I realized i myself had an old mac in storage somewhere, so I spent some 4,5 hours to revive it and I can confirm that I see the same problem. It has nothing to do with Javascript, since it still crashes if I disable Javascript. It very much looks like the Safari rendering engine just dies on something that we feed it (probably a CSS statement of some sort). I see the same problem on the german Wikipedia, but not on the Dutch wikipedia, which is .... most peculiar to say the least. The cause is most definitely a bug in Safari, but which one it is and what the exact trigger is will take a bit more time to figure out. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:04, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Template:Not English/dated prodding pages?

I noticed that the pages User:Chole72/sandbox, Draft:Detective Willy, and User:Fc20/Sequência algorítmicamente aleatória all now show up in Category:Proposed deletions needing attention, due to them being non-articles with prod tags. In each case, the last edit to the pages was an edit by AnomieBOT on November 14, 2015 to subst Template:Not English/dated. It seems that it is that template which is adding the prod tags, but somehow it seems to be malfunctioning. Can someone with more knowledge of templates than me figure out what is going on and how to get the template to stop prodding these pages (being outside article space, they aren't eligible for prod)? Also, should the template even be prodding anything at all? A prod tag is supposed to be able to be removed by anyone for any reason, but in this case when you go to edit the pages, there isn't even a prod tag there to remove. I suppose someone could object to the proposed deletion by editing or removing the Not English template, but I personally don't think obfuscating how to object to prods is a good idea. Calathan (talk) 15:15, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

It looks like User:Liz has removed the Non English template from the pages, which means they are currently no longer proposed for deletion. However, I'm still hoping someone who understands templates can figure out why the template was placing the prod tags on them. Looking at the template code (which I don't understand well), I think the template was supposed to prod them after 14 days, but instead it was prodding them after about 6 months. I would still prefer that it doesn't try to prod them at all. Calathan (talk) 17:50, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I removed the PROD tags and posted a note on Anomie's talk page about it. I think the problem was that the {{Not English}} tags had a timestamp which is unusual for a simple tag. Then, they turned into expired PRODs. Since PRODs are not used on User or Draft pages, PRODs are not appropriate deletion tools for these pages. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:54, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

I just did some more searching around, and I think I've figured out more about what is going on here. Based on Template talk:Not English#Dated, User:Rayukk tried to make Template:Not English propose articles for deletion after 14 days, and about a day later User:Jac16888 disagreed with that change and undid it. Template:Not English/dated was something Rayukk made to implement this, and Template:Not English was only using the dated template for a brief time until Jac16888 undid the change. So the pages that are getting prodded are just those where Template:Not English was substituted during that brief period of time. I think all that needs to be done is to replace Template:Not English/dated on any page that uses it with the current version of Template:Not English. I'll go ahead and do that. The issue with Template:Not English/dated prodding pages is basically moot, since that template shouldn't actually be used anywhere. Calathan (talk) 18:29, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Actually, I need to get to work (on my actual work, not Wikipedia), but if someone else could go through the pages that link to Template:Not English/dated and change them to use the normal Template:Not English, I think that would solve the problem. If no one else has time, I'll try to do that when I have more time. Calathan (talk) 18:40, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Sorted, in most cases I just removed it, it's only left now on a few testing pages--Jac16888 ^Talk 19:42, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Template:Not English/dated has now been sent to WP:TFD. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:15, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Jac16888 and GeoffreyT2000 for taking care of this. Calathan (talk) 04:36, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Notifications glitch?

I just receive an errant notification "Uncle Milty mentioned you on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bocconi Toastmaste..." The notification links to the closed AfD in which my username does not appear. The edit by Uncle Milty mentions Bbb23, but not me. Does anyone know what might have caused this?- MrX 22:17, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

The cause is an accidental transclusion, like the one that caused /Archive 145#Bogus alerts. --Pipetricker (talk) 22:43, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

I too was pinged, but nowhere in the diff or the page do I see my name. [9]—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 22:47, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

The attempted user-linking {{User:Bbb23}} in that diff caused the page User:Bbb23 to be transcluded, and your userpage is linked on that page. --Pipetricker (talk) 23:06, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

You can transclude pings? Oh wow, am I going to have fun with that!- MrX 00:33, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, otherwise the {{ping}} template wouldn't work. Unfortunately, with wikitext there's no easy way to tell whether a transclusion was accidental or not, leading to problems like this one. To mitigate this somewhat there is an upper limit on the number of users you can notify in one edit (I think it is 50 at the moment). By the way, if you find yourself pinging the same 50 users a lot, you might consider using {{mass notification}}, which makes the process (rather scarily) efficient. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 01:12, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Watchlist & contribs corruption

I imagine this is relevant to a discussion above: Watchlist getting stuck. I've got Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 [with Safari 6.1.6 (7537.78.2)] and keep getting a "some webpages are not responding" message whenever (and only when) I try to check my WP watchlist and contributions. Any other activity on Wikipedia, e.g. accessing mainspace or pages such as this, or online generally is fine. The same error message was identified on apple.com back in January 2014; for me it's only been an issue in the last two days. Has something changed on Wikipedia in that time? I also use an ancient iPad, btw, but I can access Watchlist, etc. no problem on that. Frustrating – but my question is, why is this suddenly an issue? Cheers, JG66 (talk) 14:13, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Because the code of website has a couple hundred changes per week, and because old browser are not as capable as new browsers. Oh and because browsers have hundreds and hundreds of bugs in them. And apparently those conditions came together to create a problem :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:01, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Checklinks

Why is not working [10]? Xaris333 (talk) 14:35, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

What is not working for you? I see the interface and headings but as expected no list of links since Atromitos Yeroskipou has no external links. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:16, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Sorry. I was using the Greek version. [11] Xaris333 (talk) 16:46, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

The tool appears to be broken for some foreign languages. There is a report about Romanian at User talk:Dispenser#Checklinks. Checklinks is made and run by Dispenser. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:01, 30 April 2016 (UTC)